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Amira
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‘Elegance,’ ‘Symmetry,’ and ‘Unity’: Is Scientific Truth Always Beautiful?
“Today the grandest quest of physics is to render compatible the laws of quantum physics—how particles in the subatomic world...
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In the latest attempt to corral society's growing quantities of digital data, Harvard University researchers encoded an entire book into the genetic molecules of DNA, the basic building block of life, and then accurately read back the text.
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Amira
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"The examples of scientific investigation. It is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now and speak of it explicitly. It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty—a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid—not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked—to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated. Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can—if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong—to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition. (...) We’ve learned from experience that the truth will come out. Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were wrong or right. Nature’s phenomena will agree or they’ll disagree with your theory. And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven’t tried to be very careful in this kind of work. And it’s this type of integrity, this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the research in cargo cult science. (...) But this long history of learning how not to fool ourselves—of having utter scientific integrity—is, I’m sorry to say, something that we haven’t specifically included in any particular course that I know of. We just hope you’ve caught on by osmosis. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you’ve not fooled yourself, it’s easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that."
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from cognition
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"The question we have, therefore, to consider first of all is fundamentally: What is Man? What is a man? What is a human being? What is the defining or characteristic mark of humanity? To this question two answers and only two have been given in the course of the ages, and they are both of them current to-day. One of the answers is biological—man is an animal, a certain kind of animal; the other answer is a mixture partly biological and partly mythological or partly biological and partly philosophical—man is a combination or union of animal with something supernatural. An important part of my task will be to show that both of these answers are radically wrong and that, beyond all things else, they are primarily responsible for what is dismal in the life and history
of humankind. This done, the question remains: What is Man? I hope to show clearly and convincingly that the answer is to be found in the patent fact that human beings possess in varying degrees a certain natural faculty or power or capacity which serves at once to give them their appropriate dignity as human beings and to discriminate them, not only from the minerals and the plants but also from the world of animals, this peculiar or characteristic human faculty or power or capacity I shall call. Chapter I. Introduction 11the time-binding faculty or time-binding power or time-binding capacity. What I mean by time-binding will be clearly and fully explained in the course of the discussion, and when it has been made clear, the question—What Is Man?—will be answered by saying that man is a being naturally endowed with time-binding capacity—that a human being is a time-binder—that men, women and children constitute the time-binding class of life."
Via FastTFriend
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"The latest twist in the origin-of-life tale is double helical. Chemists are close to demonstrating that the building blocks of DNA can form spontaneously from chemicals thought to be present on the primordial Earth. If they succeed, their work would suggest that DNA could have predated the birth of lifeMovie Camera. DNA is essential to almost all life on Earth, yet most biologists think that life began with RNA. Just like DNA, it stores genetic information. What's more, RNA can fold into complex shapes that can clamp onto other molecules and speed up chemical reactions, just like a protein, and it is structurally simpler than DNA, so might be easier to make. After decades of trying, in 2009 researchers finally managed to generate RNA using chemicals that probably existed on the early Earth. Matthew Powner, now at University College London, and his colleagues synthesised two of the four nucleotides that make up RNA. Their achievement suggested that RNA may have formed spontaneously - powerful support for the idea that life began in an "RNA world". (...) Nucleotides consist of a sugar attached to a phosphate and a nitrogen-containing base molecule - these bases are the familiar letters of the genetic code. DNA nucleotides, which link together to form DNA, are harder to make than RNA nucleotides, because DNA uses a different sugar that is tougher to work with. Starting with a mix of chemicals, many of them thought to have been present on the early Earth, Powner has now created a sugar like that in DNA, linked to a molecule called AICA, which is similar to a base (Journal of the American Chemical Society, doi.org/h6q). (....) That could have important implications for our understanding of life's origins. (...) Conventional wisdom is that RNA-based life eventually switched to DNA because DNA is better at storing information. In other words, RNA organisms made the first DNA. (...) Life may have begun with an "RNA and DNA world", in which the two types of nucleotides were intermingled. (...) Powner suggests that life started out using these hybrid molecules, gradually purifying them into DNA and RNA."
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Abstract: “The advent of the Internet, with sophisticated algorithmic search engines, has made accessing information as easy as lifting a finger. No longer do we have to make costly efforts to find the things we want. We can “Google” the old classmate, find articles online, or look up the actor who was on the tip of our tongue. The results of four studies suggest that when faced with difficult questions, people are primed to think about computers and that when people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it. The Internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves.” ***
“We investigate whether the Internet has become an external memory system that is primed by the need to acquire information. If asked the question whether there are any countries with only one color in their flag, for example, do we think about flags—or immediately think to go online to find out? Our research then tested if, once information has been accessed, our internal encoding is increased for where the information is to be found rather than for the information itself. (…) And transactive memory is also evident when people seem better able to remember which computer folder an item has been stored in than the identity of the item itself. These results suggest that processes of human memory are adapting to the advent of new computing and communication technology. Just as we learn through transactive memory who knows what in our families and offices, we are learning what the computer “knows” and when we should attend to where we have stored information in our computer-based memories. We are becoming symbiotic with our computer tools, growing into interconnected systems that remember less by knowing information than by knowing where the information can be found. (...) We have become dependent on them to the same degree we are dependent on all the knowledge we gain from our friends and coworkers—and lose if they are out of touch. The experience of losing our Internet connection becomes more and more like losing a friend. We must remain plugged in to know what Google knows.”
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“The idea that we can systematically understand certain aspects of the world and make predictions based on what we’ve learned — while appreciating and categorizing the extent and limitations of what we know — plays a big role in how we think. Many words that summarize the nature of science such as “cause and effect,” “predictions,” and ” experiments,” as well as words that describe probabilistic results such as “mean,” “median,” “standard deviation,” and the notion of “probability” itself help us understand more specifically what this means and how to interpret the world and behavior within it. “Effective theory” is one of the more important notions within and outside of science. The idea is to determine what you can actually measure and decide — given the precision and accuracy of your measuring tools — and to find a theory appropriate to those measurable quantities. The theory that works might not be the ultimate truth—but it’s as close an approximation to the truth as you need and is also the limit to what you can test at any given time. People can reasonably disagree on what lies beyond the effective theory, but in a domain where we have tested and confirmed it, we understand the theory to the degree that it’s been tested. An example is Newton’s Laws, which work as well as we will ever need when they describe what happens to a ball when we throw it. Even though we now know quantum mechanics is ultimately at play, it has no visible consequences on the trajectory of the ball. Newton’s Laws are part of an effective theory that is ultimately subsumed into quantum mechanics. Yet Newton’s Laws remain practical and true in their domain of validity. It’s similar to the logic you apply when you look at a map. You decide the scale appropriate to your journey — are you traveling across the country, going upstate, or looking for the nearest grocery store — and use the map scale appropriate to your question. Terms that refer to specific scientific results can be efficient at times but they can also be misleading when taken out of context and not supported by true scientific investigation. But the scientific methods for seeking, testing, and identifying answers and understanding the limitations of what we have investigated will always be reliable ways of acquiring knowledge. A better understanding of the robustness and limitations of what science establishes, as well as probabilistic results and predictions, could make the world a better place.”
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Amira
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“According to the idea of model-dependent realism, our brains interpret the input from our sensory organs by making a model of the outside world. We form mental concepts of our home, trees, other people, the electricity that flows from wall sockets, atoms, molecules, and other universes. These mental concepts are the only reality we can know. There is no modelindependent test of reality. It follows that a well-constructed model creates a reality of its own.”
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Amira
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"The editors over at Edge.org asked some of the most influential thinkers in the world — including neuroscientists, physicists and mathematicians — what they believe are the most important scientific concepts of the modern era. (...) The Copernican Principal is the idea that we are not special — that the universe is much larger, and we have a rather insignificant role. "The paradox of the Copernican Principle is that by properly understanding our place, even if it be humbling, we can only then truly understand our particular circumstances. And when we do, we don't seem so insignificant after all." -- Samuel Arbesman (...) Double-blind control experiment: It's a tool that researchers use to prevent against subconscious bias when performing experiments. Understanding the need for double-blind experiments would help the rest of the population understand their inherent subjective, everyday biases, and guard against generalization and impress upon people the need for critical thinking." -- Richard Dawkins (...) Umwelt is the idea that we blindly accept the reality of the world around us. “It would be useful if the concept of the umwelt were embedded in the public lexicon. It neatly captures that idea of limited knowledge, of unobtainable information, of unimagined possibilities.” — David Eagleman
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"In 2008, scientists fired up the Large Hadron Collider and began searching for the answer to one of the biggest questions in physics: Why do particles have mass? Now, 50 years after Peter Higgs first proposed what became known as the Higgs boson, the various researchers at CERN have the utmost certainty that they have found it." "The Standard Model describes the fundamental particles from which we, and every visible thing in the universe, are made, and the forces acting between them. All the matter that we can see, however, appears to be no more than about 4% of the total. A more exotic version of the Higgs particle could be a bridge to understanding the 96% of the universe that remains obscure.
“We have reached a milestone in our understanding of nature,” said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer. http://phys.org/news/2012-07-cern-physicists-strong-evidence-particle.html "Scientists believe that in the first billionth of a second after the Big Bang, the universe was a gigantic soup of particles racing around at the speed of light without any mass to speak of. It was through their interaction with the Higgs field that they gained mass and eventually formed the universe." http://www.firstpost.com/world/live-cern-scientists-presenting-evidence-for-god-particle-366545.html Physicists At CERN Confirm Discovery Of Elusive Higgs Particle Essential To Understanding The Universe: "The discovery of the Higgs boson is the last piece of the puzzle for the Standard Model, which will now likely be refined with further experimentation and potentially pave the way toward even more unification theories. But for now, science has another toolset — like Newton’s Laws of Motion, Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, and quantum mechanics — in which to study the strangeness and mystery of everything that surrounds us. Understanding of other cosmic phenomena, such as dark matter and dark energy, extra dimensions, antimatter, and string theory, will only benefit from this deeper understanding of subatomic particles and the forces that bind them." http://www.forbes.com/sites/singularity/2012/07/04/physicists-at-cern-confirm-discovery-of-elusive-higgs-particle-essential-to-understanding-the-universe/ See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson Replay from conference https://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1459604
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Amira
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"Why do we like music? Our culture immerses us in it for hours each day, and everyone knows how it touches our emotions, but few think of how music touches other kinds of thought. It is astonishing how little curiosity we have about so pervasive an "environmental" influence. What might we discover if we were to study musical thinking? (...) Something has a "meaning" only when it has a few; if we understood something just one way, we would not understand it at all. That is why the seekers of the "real" meanings never find them. This holds true especially for words like 'understand'. That is why sonatas start simply, as do the best of talks and texts. The basics are repeated several times before anything larger or more complex is presented."
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Amira
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"The incredible night photos and time-lapse movies NASA has been sharing with us provoke questions about our planet. That thin-yellow atmospheric line separating earth from space, for example, that we see in all of the night shots provokes two questions: (1) how thick is this line? and (2) why is this line colored the way it is? The visible yellow and green/blue capped line represents atmosphere reaching ~100km above the surface of the earth. The colors are not reflected light, and not pollution, but rather are light generated from the components in the atmosphere itself. Yes, the atmosphere gives off its own light, in a chemiluminescent process called "airglow" or "night glow.""
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Amira
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The very laws of physics imply that artificial intelligence must be possible. What's holding us up?
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Amira
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Richard Feynman courtesy of the Cornell Messenger Lecture Archive. Cornell Mathematics Library. Lecture #6 Probability and Uncertainty in quantum mechanics.
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Amira
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Abstract: "We extend the concept that life is an informational phenomenon, at every level of organisation, from molecules to the global ecological system. According to this thesis: (a) living is information processing, in which memory is maintained by both molecular states and ecological states as well as the more obvious nucleic acid coding; (b) this information processing has one overall function - to perpetuate itself; and (c) the processing method is filtration (cognition) of, and synthesis of, information at lower levels to appear at higher levels in complex systems (emergence). We show how information patterns, are united by the creation of mutual context, generating persistent consequences, to result in 'functional information'. This constructive process forms arbitrarily large complexes of information, the combined effects of which include the functions of life. Molecules and simple organisms have already been measured in terms of functional information content; we show how quantification may extended to each level of organisation up to the ecological. In terms of a computer analogy, life is both the data and the program and its biochemical structure is the way the information is embodied. This idea supports the seamless integration of life at all scales with the physical universe. "
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Amira
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"The furthest back in time that we are currently actively seeing is 13,7 _ 0,15 billion years -- 379,000 years The 13.7 billion years is the currently measured time to the Big Bang and 379,000 years is the number of years after the Big Bang when the universe cooled off enough to become transparent. The (mostly visible light) photons from the hot plasma that filled the universe at that time have been traveling since then and have now been red-shifted down into the microwave range. This is the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation that has been very accurately measured by the WMAP satellite. We will not be able to see back further in time (to before 379,000 years after the Big Bang) with photons since the universe was opaque to photons before that time. However, if we are ever able to use neutrino telescopes to measure very low energy neutrinos (which is probably impossible), then we would be able to see back to a few minutes after the Big Bang. Finally, it is also theoretically possible to see back to roughly seconds after the Big Bang if we could measure the possible gravitational waves that could have been generated at the end of the inflationary period of the Big Bang at that time." See also: If there was a mirror a million light years away and I looked at via telescope, how far back would I see in the past?
http://www.quora.com/If-there-was-a-mirror-a-million-light-years-away-and-I-looked-at-via-telescope-how-far-back-would-I-see-in-the-past
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“There’s a new kind of socio-inspired technology coming up, now. Society has many wonderful self-organization mechanisms that we can learn from, such as trust, reputation, culture. If we can learn how to implement that in our technological system, that is worth a lot of money; billions of dollars, actually. We think this is the next step after bio-inspired technology. (…) If those computers interact with each other, it’s creating an artificial social system in some sense. (…) That tells us something that we need to change our perspective regarding these systems. Those complex systems are not characterized anymore by the properties of their components. But they’re characterized by what is the outcome of the interactions between those components. As a result of those interactions, self-organization is going on in these systems. New emergent properties come up. They can be very surprising, actually, and that means we cannot understand those systems anymore, based on what we see, which is the components. (…) We need to have new instruments and tools to understand these kinds of systems. (…) “We have interconnected everything. In some sense, we have created unstable systems. (…) Just take financial trading today, it’s done by the most powerful computers. These computers are creating a view of the environment; in this case the financial world. They’re making projections into the future. They’re communicating with each other. They have really many features of humans. And that basically establishes an artificial society, which means also we may have all the problems that we are facing in society if we don’t design these systems well. (…) We really need to understand those systems, not just their components. (…) Their interaction is creating a completely new world, and it is very important to recognize that it’s not just a gradual change of our world; there is a sudden transition in the behavior of those systems, as the coupling strength exceeds a certain threshold. (…) What will be very important in order to make sense of the complexity of our information society is to overcome the disciplinary silos of science. (…) Big Data is not a solution per se. Even the most powerful machine learning algorithm will not be sufficient to make sense of our world, to understand the principles according to which our world is working. This is important to recognize. The great challenge is to marry data with theories, with models. (…) Information society will transform our society fundamentally and we shouldn’t just let it happen. We want to understand how that will change our society, and what are the different pathes that our society may take, and decide for the one that we want it to take. (…) In the future, [this sea of data] will probably be a cheap resource, or even a free resource to a certain extent, if we learn how to deal with openness of data. The expensive thing will be what we do with the data. That means the algorithms, the models, and theories that allow us to make sense of the data.”
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Amira
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"Are we prepared for dealing with the prospect that humanity is not the end of evolution? Technocalyps is an intriguing three-part documentary on the notion of trans-humanism by Belgian visual artist and filmmaker Frank Theys. The accelerating advances in genetics, brain research, artificial intelligence, bionics and nanotechnology seem to converge to one goal: to overcome human limits and create higher forms of intelligent life and to create transhuman life. The film includes interviews by top scientists and thinkers on the subject worldwide, including Marvin Minsky, Ray Kurzweil, Hans Moravec, Terence McKenna, Bruce Sterling, Robert Anton Wilson, Margaret Wertheim, Rael, the Dalai Lama and many more."
http://www.technocalyps.com/ Playlist: Part I, Part II, Part III http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMCMs_11Llg&list=PL6BA4CFB37AA00F45&feature=plpp_play_all
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“Morality is not the product of a mythical pure reason divorced from natural selection and the neural wiring that motivates the animal to sociability. It emerges from the human brain and its responses to real human needs, desires, and social experience; it depends on innate emotional responses, on reward circuitry that allows pleasure and fear to be associated with certain conditions, on cortical networks, hormones and neuropeptides. Its cognitive underpinnings owe more to case-based reasoning than to conformity to rules.
(...) Hardware and software are intertwined to such an extent that all philosophy must be “neurophilosophy.” There’s no other way. (...) Morality turns out to be not a quest for overarching principles but rather a process and practice not very different from negotiating our way through day-to-day social life. Brain scans, she points out, show little to no difference between how the brain works when solving social problems and how it works when solving ethical dilemmas. (…) [Churchland] thinks, with Aristotle’s argument that morality is not about rule-making but instead about the cultivation of moral sentiment through experience, training, and the following of role models. The biological story also confirms, she thinks, David Hume’s assertion that reason and the emotions cannot be disentangled. (...) Churchland describes this process of moral decision-making as being driven by “constraint satisfaction.” (...) roughly speaking it involves various factors with various weights and probabilities interacting so as to produce a suitable solution to a question.” (...) Morality doesn’t become any different than deciding what kind of bridge to build across a river. (...) Our intuitions about how to get along with other people may have been shaped by our interactions within small groups (and between small groups). But we don’t live in small groups anymore, so we need some procedures through which we leverage our social skills into uncharted areas—and that is what the traditional academic philosophers, whom Churchland mostly rejects, work on. What are our obligations to future generations (concerning climate change, say)? What do we owe poor people on the other side of the globe (whom we might never have heard of, in our evolutionary past)? (...) [A] several universal “foundations” of moral thought: (...) That strikes her as a nice list, but no more—a random collection of moral qualities that isn’t at all rooted in biology."
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"Hierarchy (...) is a way of limiting complexity in the interest of both stability and evolvability. Simon argued that systems structured in this way possess a basic, competitive simplicity. (...) Take ordinary bone, for example, which is remarkably tough, yet lightweight, with properties that our technology still cannot match. The secret is hierarchy. Within bone, small molecules bind together into proteins, which then link into filaments, which in turn organize into larger structures. When a bone suffers a blow, the hierarchy provides a variety of mechanisms by which it can pass along the excess energy it absorbs, without creating lasting damage. Bone, like most other structures in biology, is not just complex, but complex in a highly organized way. What about structures in economics and finance? The growth of modern finance seems to have violated the principle of hierarchical structures, and with gusto. Two trends in the past 30 years — the merging of banks into huge institutions and the explosion of derivatives that link them around the globe — have made the network much less modular. We have created a vast web of interconnections with extreme complexity but little organization. And this does appear to have made the system less resilient. (...) Unlike organisms, of course, financial systems haven’t undergone evolutionary competition from which only the fit have emerged. We have little reason to expect that what exists would be anything like optimal, or even reasonable. (...) Both high concentration and high interconnectedness contribute to an “everything is linked to everything” outcome that is the very opposite of modularity, and a likely recipe for instability. Financial engineering should learn to avoid this architecture, just as surely as biology has.”
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“Consider that you can see less than 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum and hear less than 1% of the acoustic spectrum. As you read this, you are traveling at 220 km/sec across the galaxy. 90% of the cells in your body carry their own microbial DNA and are not “you.” The atoms in your body are 99.9999999999999999% empty space and none of them are the ones you were born with, but they all originated in the belly of a star. Human beings have 46 chromosomes, 2 less than the common potato. The existence of the rainbow depends on the conical photoreceptors in your eyes; to animals without cones, the rainbow does not exist. So you don’t just look at a rainbow, you create it. This is pretty amazing, especially considering that all the beautiful colors you see represent less than 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum.”
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Abstract: "In this paper I discuss the question: what comes first, physics or information? The two have had a long-standing, symbiotic relationship for almost a hundred years out of which we have learnt a great deal. Information theory has enriched our interpretations of quantum physics, and, at the same time, offered us deep insights into general relativity through the study of black hole thermodynamics. Whatever the outcome of this debate, I argue that physicists will be able to benefit from continuing to explore connections between the two." See also: Vlatko Vedral: Decoding Reality: the universe as quantum information http://aminotes.tumblr.com/post/6223874154/vlatko-vedral-decoding-reality-the-universe-as
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