Sandbox (4)

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Sometimes very active discussions about peripheral issues overwhelm a thread, so this is a permanent home for those conversations.

I’ve opened a new “Sandbox” thread as a post as the new “ignore commenter” plug-in only works on threads started as posts.

5,869 thoughts on “Sandbox (4)”

  1. J-Mac: It’s clear that the ignore button works better than 3 biased moderators…

    You should learn how to use it then!

  2. stcordova,

    Yes, Wiener is quite interesting. Though he’s not generally regarded as a philosopher by professional philosophers, his contributions to cybernetics (including coining the term!) are substantial. A few days ago I finished reading On the Origins of Cognitive Science by Jean-Pierre Dupuy. It’s a fascinating and detailed intellectual history of the early cybernetics movement and has lots of detail about McCulloch, Pitts, von Neumann, Wiener, and Turing.

    From there I was led to discover the British cyberneticists (esp Ross Ashby and Grey Walter) who had a major impact on second-order cybernetics with Heinz von Foerster, Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, and Niklas Luhmann. I have been an avid reader of Maturana and Varela for a long time but I didn’t realize until today how much they were grounded in second-order cybernetics. And I also learned today how much second-order cybernetics emerged in response to Ross Ashby’s challenge to McCulloch at one of the later Macy conferences.

    Not only that but cybernetics also influenced Gregory Bateson, R. D. Laing, and even Brian Eno, Brian Gysin, and William S. Burroughs!

    Fascinating stuff!

  3. I went cycling in my neck of the woods…beautiful conservation areas…I noticed that in some cultures men and women sit in separate circles, eat and drink separately…even walk…

    One thing they can’t avoid doing separately though… jiggy jiggy🤣

  4. Kantian Naturalist:
    stcordova,

    Yes, Wiener is quite interesting. Though he’s not generally regarded as a philosopher by professional philosophers, his contributions to cybernetics (including coining the term!) are substantial. A few days ago I finished reading On the Origins of Cognitive Science by Jean-Pierre Dupuy. It’s a fascinating and detailed intellectual history of the early cybernetics movement and has lots of detail about McCulloch, Pitts, von Neumann, Wiener, and Turing.

    From there I was led to discover the British cyberneticists (esp Ross Ashby and Grey Walter) who had a major impact on second-order cybernetics with Heinz von Foerster, Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, and Niklas Luhmann. I have been an avid reader of Maturana and Varela for a long time but I didn’t realize until today how much they were grounded in second-order cybernetics. And I also learned today how much second-order cybernetics emerged in response to Ross Ashby’s challenge to McCulloch at one of the later Macy conferences.

    Not only that but cybernetics also influenced Gregory Bateson, R. D. Laing, and even Brian Eno, Brian Gysin, and William S. Burroughs!

    Fascinating stuff!

    Thank you very much for the informative reply.

  5. Most of the Quantum Mechanics stuff I studied was plain vanilla stuff for chemistry and lasers, however my Graduate Advisor at the time Bryan Jacobs, was pioneer of quantum computing. Some of my classmates studied the topic. I just was never able to get it schedule as it conflicted with other classes.

    Anyway, This article was interesting:

    https://www.sciencealert.com/are-we-all-quantum-computers-with-quantum-brains

    Other experiments will look at the potential for decoherence, which happens when the links and dependency between qubits – the idea of quantum entanglement – start to break down. For our brains to be quantum computers, there must be a built-in way that our biological qubits are shielded from decoherence.

    Yet another experiment is going to investigate mitochondria, the cell subunits responsible for our metabolism and sending messages around the body. It’s possible that these organelles also play a significant role in qubit entanglement.

    In other words, the neurotransmitters and synaptic firing in our brains could be creating quantum coupled networks, just like a quantum computer. Fisher and his team will attempt to emulate this in the lab.

  6. stcordova: In other words, the neurotransmitters and synaptic firing in our brains could be creating quantum coupled networks, just like a quantum computer. Fisher and his team will attempt to emulate this in the lab.

    Could quantum computer send quantum information back in time?

    https://www.frontiersin.org/files/Articles/32581/fnint-06-00093-r2/image_m/fnint-06-00093-g011.jpg

    Figure 11. Backward time in EPR entanglement. The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) experiment verified by Aspect et al. (1982); Tittel et al. (1998), and many others. On the left is an isolated, entangled pair of superpositioned complementary quantum particles, e.g., two electrons in spin up and spin down states. The pair is separated and sent to two different, spatially-separated locations/measuring devices. The single electron at the top (in superposition of both spin up and spin down states) is measured, and reduces to a single classical state (e.g., spin down). Instantaneously its spatially-separated twin reduces to the complementary state of spin up (or vice versa). The effect is instantaneous over significant distance, hence appears to be transmitted faster than the speed of light. According to Penrose (2004; cf. Bennett and Wiesner, 1992), measurement/reduction of the electron at the top sends quantum information backward in time to the origin of the unified entanglement, then onward to the twin electron. No other reasonable explanation has been put forth.

  9. The meaning word random doesn’t have universal agreement especially in ID debates.

    The word “intention” and “purpose” (or lack thereof) is NOT in the mathematical definitions used in industry such as electrical engineering.

    http://www.ifp.illinois.edu/~hajek/Papers/randomprocJuly14.pdf

    The above link says it uses the Kolmogorov notion of random, which isn’t exactly the most easy to understand!

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity#Kolmogorov_randomness

    My qualitative approximation is that random means, unpredictable. One can’t be given one sequence and then be able to predict EXACTLY another sequence in an exact location.

    Unfortunately random is conflated colloquially with arbitrary and unintentional. In formal analyses these distinctions need to be clarified.

    Contrast the formalism the notion of Random in Math, Computer Science, and Electrical Engineering with the Thesaurus associations!

    random. haphazard, chance, casual, arbitrary, desultory, aimless, indiscriminate, irregular, unsystematic, undirected, unplanned, planless, purposeless, orderless, accidental, fortuitous, blind, hit-or-miss, stray, erratic, aleatory, stochastic; see also aimless, haphazard, irregular

    UGH!

  10. stcordova: The meaning word random doesn’t have universal agreement especially in ID debates.

    That doesn’t parse.

    In mathematics (probability theory), it is best to think of “random” as an undefined concept. The axioms tell us how to use it, but they don’t say what it is.

    Colloquial use of “random” is all over the field.

  11. Neil Rickert: That doesn’t parse.

    In mathematics (probability theory), it is best to think of “random” as an undefined concept.The axioms tell us how to use it, but they don’t say what it is.

    Colloquial use of “random” is all over the field.

    Thanks Neil! I need that feedback for a presentation I’m thinking of doing at my church (the one Donald Trump visited recently). 🙂

  12. stcordova: Thanks Neil!I need that feedback for a presentation I’m thinking of doing at my church(the one Donald Trump visited recently).

    Did you get Paul Davies’ book?
    If not, you should read it…

    I will send you and email. I would like to review an equations for me for Quantum information in DNA…Can you?

  15. fifth:

    Apparently the nested hierarchy is not quite as “objective” as has been claimed by Darwinists ad nauseum.

    No one will be surprised to hear that fifth has misunderstood the article, which poses no threat to the ONH.

  16. https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/what-to-expect-in-the-democratic-debates

    The sheer number of candidates created problems for the Democratic National Committee. To avoid giving the impression that one of the nights would be host to the “kiddie debate,” light on front-runners, the D.N.C. determined the lineups using a two-part random draw. But the debates ended up lopsided anyway. Of the five leaders in the polls, only Warren will take part on Wednesday. The other four—Biden, Buttigieg, Harris, and Sanders—will all appear on Thursday.

    The conventional wisdom is that this split will be good for Warren, whose poll rating has doubled since April.

    So much for random draws! Occasionally one will still get dealt a lopsided hand!

    I think Warren has a revolting personality. Booker is more telegenic. Delaney is the most accomplished (from 0 to 200,000,000 net worth in one lifetime). Butigieg is the most well spoken. I found out Booker and Butigieg are scholars, so is Delaney. It didn’t surprise me. I picked that up like the first few minutes when I heard them speak (though I disagree with their policies.)

  20. What Biden should have said to Kamala Harris in debate when Harris insinuated that Biden praised racism.

    “The first black president of the United States, Barrack Obama, picked ME to be his vice president, not you, B—–.”

  21. Werner von Braun in photo with Hitler. von Braun is the guy without a hat in a double breasted suit toward the top of the photo.

  22. About 20 years after his photo with der Fuhrer the 3rd Reich, here is von Braun at the side of President Kennedy of the USA!

  23. ‘Manned space flight is an amazing achievement, but it has opened for mankind thus far only a tiny door for viewing the awesome reaches of space. An outlook through this peep-hole at the vast mysteries of the universe should only confirm our belief in the certainty of its Creator’

    von Braun

  24. stcordova:
    What Biden should have said to Kamala Harris in debate when Harris insinuated that Biden praised racism.

    He praised a segregationist politician from Mississippi, ever been to Mississippi?

    “A Dixiecrat, Eastland was known as the symbol of Southern resistance to racial integration during the civil rights era, often speaking of blacks as “an inferior race”. I am sure he was very respectful other than that.

    “The first black president of the United States, Barrack Obama, picked ME to be his vice president, not you, B—–.”

    She was the District Attorney of San Francisco at the time , unlikely she would be asked as Vice President. Biden ,on the other hand , was a failed presidential candidate, who welcomed fellow candidate Obama to the race with “”I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy, I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”

    And still is a million times better than the maroon in the White House.

  25. Computer generated jokes:

    Here’s a selection of the jokes:

    “What do you call a cat does it take to screw in a light bulb? They could worry the banana.”

    “What did the new ants say after a dog? It was a pirate.”

    “Why did the monsters change a lightbulb? And a cow the cough.”

    “What do you call a pastor cross the road? He take the chicken.”

    “What do you call a farts of tea? He was calling the game of the dry.”

    Killah material!

  27. newton: And still is a million times better than the maroon in the White House.

    Now now, despite his reputation, Trump is FOR immigrants. By golly, he married the girl in this photo who is an immigrant:

  28. stcordova: Now now, despite his reputation, Trump is FOR immigrants.By golly, he married the girl in this photo who is an immigrant:

    Just because he probably still thinks she’s Norwegian

  29. dazz: Just because he probably still thinks she’s Norwegian

    Whoa! I didn’t know that. I looked up this video in light of your comment:

    Thanks for the tip.

  31. Commentators on Fox are saying Kamala Harris has Biden on the ropes as She is almost tied with him now in the polls.

    When Neil Cavoto heard that he referred to Foreman putting Ali on the Ropes, but Ali whooped Foreman in the end with a 4 punch combination.

    https://youtu.be/04AUKKBgxI0

    But Biden ain’t no Ali! We’ll see.

    In the mean time, looks like Castro will not even be invited to next round of debates since he’s below the threshold established by the Democrat National Committee.

    https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/if-only-they-had-a-uterus-bill-maher-rips-julian-castro-for-remark-about-abortion-for-trans-women

    ‘If only they had a uterus’: Bill Maher rips Julián Castro for remark about abortion for trans women

    HBO host Bill Maher ripped in Julián Castro for caring about the “Twitter mob” after saying during last week’s Democratic presidential debate that he supports abortion rights for transgender women.

    “Honestly, the Democrats so often their own worst enemy. Still, you know, trying to get the Twitter mob instead of the 98% who can give a shit about Twitter,” Maher said Friday. “Julián Castro won the ‘Woke Olympics’ on the first night when he said, ‘Trans females should have the right to an abortion.’ I agree.”

    “Now if only they had a uterus,” Maher joked. “Try selling that in the red states. ‘If a man identifies as a woman, then we stand with her right not only to imagine that she’s pregnant but to terminate that pregnancy which is not possible.'”

    This was a great monologue by Maher, OUCH!
    https://youtu.be/oap5OK71gC8

  33. stcordova: “The first black president of the United States, Barrack Obama, picked ME to be his vice president, not you, B—–.”

    What a sad, pathetic little man you are. Use bitch often to describe people who have accomplished more then you ever have or will?

  34. stcordova: Thanks.

    Sal,
    Maybe you should help out Darwin boys?
    They have no clue what “information” is copied in DNA…😉

  36. Another Geek Cult Classic:

    The Emperor’s New Mind: concerning computers, minds, and the laws of physics by Roger Penrose

  37. Regarding Goedel Escher Bach, from Amazon description:

    Twenty years after it topped the bestseller charts, Douglas R. Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid is still something of a marvel. Besides being a profound and entertaining meditation on human thought and creativity, this book looks at the surprising points of contact between the music of Bach, the artwork of Escher, and the mathematics of Gödel. It also looks at the prospects for computers and artificial intelligence (AI) for mimicking human thought. For the general reader and the computer techie alike, this book still sets a standard for thinking about the future of computers and their relation to the way we think.

    Hofstadter’s great achievement in Gödel, Escher, Bach was making abstruse mathematical topics (like undecidability, recursion, and ‘strange loops’) accessible and remarkably entertaining. Borrowing a page from Lewis Carroll (who might well have been a fan of this book), each chapter presents dialogue between the Tortoise and Achilles, as well as other characters who dramatize concepts discussed later in more detail. Allusions to Bach’s music (centering on his Musical Offering) and Escher’s continually paradoxical artwork are plentiful here. This more approachable material lets the author delve into serious number theory (concentrating on the ramifications of Gödel’s Theorem of Incompleteness) while stopping along the way to ponder the work of a host of other mathematicians, artists, and thinkers.

    The world has moved on since 1979, of course. The book predicted that computers probably won’t ever beat humans in chess, though Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov in 1997. And the vinyl record, which serves for some of Hofstadter’s best analogies, is now left to collectors. Sections on recursion and the graphs of certain functions from physics look tantalizing, like the fractals of recent chaos theory. And AI has moved on, of course, with mixed results. Yet Gödel, Escher, Bach remains a remarkable achievement. Its intellectual range and ability to let us visualize difficult mathematical concepts help make it one of this century’s best for anyone who’s interested in computers and their potential for real intelligence. –Richard Dragan

  38. J-Mac: They have no clue what “information” is copied in DNA…

    And you cannot answer any question at all on “the quantum” so what’s your point?

    Suppose we have a a qbit, with the usual basis states |0⟩ and |1⟩. Suppose we have a qbit “copier” that, given a gbit in the state |0⟩ produces a pair of qbits in the state |0⟩|0⟩, and given one in the state |1⟩, produces a pair in the state |1⟩|1⟩. Straightforward so far, right?

    (I did think about doing this with a 4-state system with {|A⟩, |C⟩, |G⟩, |T⟩} as its basis, but it just made the algebra sloggier.)

    Now, let’s define two other states for our qbits, |+⟩ = (|0⟩ + |1⟩)/sqrt(2) and |-⟩ = (|0⟩ – |1⟩)/sqrt(2). These are orthogonal and unitary, so they form another basis for our qbit’s state space.

    Question 1: Suppose we fed a qbit in the state |+⟩ into the “copier”. What state would the pair of qbits it produces be in?

    Question 2: Suppose, given two qbits in the state from question 1, we measured each of them in the {|+⟩, |-⟩} basis. What’re the possible combinations of results we might get and their probabilities?

    Question 3: Suppose we lost the copy (i.e. the second qbit). Is there any test we can perform on the first qbit that’ll distinguish it from being in a random state? If so, what is it?

    So there’s your challenge. Either answer the questions, or admit that you don’t understand QM well enough to.

    FYI by not answering them you are admitting that you cannot.

  40. stcordova: You mean “THAN” not “then”.

    Shrug. I’m in the top 0.1% for words. You believe the earth is 6000 years old despite not because of the evidence. I’d start there if I were you.

  41. OMagain,

    You’re so humorless. I hope you waste hours of your life reading what I write and getting upset. It will shorten your life. I’ll put you on ignore, so please spend some time writing stuff I’m not going to read. Cheers. Bye.

  42. stcordova: You’re so humorless. I hope you waste hours of your life reading what I write and getting upset. It will shorten your life. I’ll put you on ignore, so please spend some time writing stuff I’m not going to read. Cheers. Bye.

    First, wishing someone a earlier demise because they wrote mean things to you, might not make the Christian God ,embodied in Jesus, that you are wagering to exist very pleased.

    Second , there is a psychological theory that repressing one’s feelings is detrimental, If which case the effect may be the opposite of what you hope.

    Third, while directed at you, it may be appreciated by many.

  45. stcordova:
    “when the wicked perish, there are shouts of joy.”Proverbs 11:10

    Right, fuck those “turn the other cheek” snowflakes.

  46. J-Mac:
    Sal,
    Maybe you should help out Darwin boys?
    They have no clue what “information” is copied in DNA…

    1. Since I’m not a “Darwin boy”, I cannot tell what they may or may not know.
    2. I doubt that Salvador knows anything about DNA, so he cannot explain anything to those “Darwin boys.”
    3. I doubt that you know anything about DNA, let alone what “information” is “copied” “in” DNA. So, your mockery is misdirected at best (Matthew 7:3-5).
    4. Knowing you, you must be imagining some magical, mystical, “immaterial,” “quantum” “information” woo-woo.
    5. you’re an uneducable idiot.

  47. Religion studies in Unversities. It seems there is a mix of professors of religion in universities, those that teach about some religions without believing specifically in religion, and those that teach about some religions but actually believe in that religion.

    I can imagine, for example, a Christian teaching Greek mythology and feeling completely free to do so. I have no problem with that.

    But is it Ok for a conservative Christian to teach about conservative Christian beliefs in a secular university?????

    Where I’m headed with this is, I was exploring the idea of an endowed chair teaching Intelligent Design and Creationism in the religion department. Not that I expect any university to accept the possibility given the political climate, BUT as a matter of principle, is this possible. Is it fair game for a university environment?

    I know of some professors in Christian universities are considering forming courses in creation and intelligent design. It hasn’t happened yet, to my knowledge, at least not even in YEC universities like Liberty in Lynchburg Virginia, where the Illustrious President of the USA Donald Trump gave a commencement speech as one of the early acts of his presidency. 🙂

  49. walto:

    Crimity.

    Appears to be one more experiment demonstrating something “already inherent in the formalism of QM”.
    The article is correct to point out that QM requires a metaphysics which mandates spatial and apparently temporal holism — that is, we cannot reduce reality to Lewis’s Humean supervenience claim that “reality is a vast mosaic of local matters of particular fact” since there are quantum facts that belong only to the entangled system.

    ETA: Deleted some meandering about properties

  50. walto:
    https://www.sciencealert.com/if-you-thought-quantum-mechanics-was-weird-wait-til-you-check-out-entangled-time?utm_source=pocket-newtab

    Crimity.

    From the article:

    “I know of course how the hocus pocus works mathematically,” he wrote to Einstein on 13 July 1935. “But I do not like such a theory.”

    Schrödinger’s famous cat, suspended between life and death, first appeared in these letters, a byproduct of the struggle to articulate what bothered the pair.

    The problem is that entanglement violates how the world ought to work. Information can’t travel faster than the speed of light, for one.

    But in a 1935 paper, Einstein and his co-authors showed how entanglement leads to what’s now called quantum nonlocality, the eerie link that appears to exist between entangled particles.

    If two quantum systems meet and then separate, even across a distance of thousands of lightyears, it becomes impossible to measure the features of one system (such as its position, momentum and polarity) without instantly steering the other into a corresponding state.

    When I worked at MITRE (MIT’s Rejected Engineers) they had quantum cryptography machines on display that leveraged some of this wierdness.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_cryptography

    Companies that manufacture quantum cryptography systems include MagiQ Technologies, Inc. (Boston, Massachusetts, United States), ID Quantique (Geneva, Switzerland), QuintessenceLabs (Canberra, Australia) and SeQureNet (Paris, France).

    I met some people at MITRE Virginia who worked on this stuff. Here is someone at MITRE Massachusetts working on this stuff, plus quantum computing

    https://www.mitre.org/careers/working-at-mitre/employee-voices/mitre-physicist-in-pursuit-of-big-changes-in-the-quantum

    The partnership may contribute to fundamental knowledge of control and engineering of quantum systems, breakthroughs in quantum sensing, and quantum materials discovery and fabrication. Ultimately, these systems will be leveraged for quantum information processing in communications and computation applications—with the objective of developing a true quantum computer.

    Quantum Communications through Classical Channels
    Levine also leads a research effort focused on maintaining secure communications. This work draws on both classical and quantum communications. “All quantum communications systems require classical channels,”Levine says.

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