Years ago, Albert Einstein made a typical human kind of
error in trying to understand quantum mechanics. Einstein famously said “common
sense is nothing but a collection of prejudices acquired before the age of (16).”
But he himself fell victim to the same kind of thing. When his own mathematics
showed us the symmetry of the universe in time and in space, and in forwards
time versus backwards time… he did not assimilate the implications in his gut.
He proposed an experiment, the famous Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen experiment (later
refined into the “Bell’s Theorem” experiments), which would disagree with
quantum mechanics, ONLY on the assumption that physical effects can only march
forwards in time, never backwards. His common sense was proven wrong… but his
mathematics still works, as I have shown (see www.werbos.com/quantum.htm).
But last year I made the same kind of mistake myself. I too failed to fully appreciate how rich the
phenomena can be which emerge in a universe with just three dimensions of space
and one of time. I even felt there
seemed to be a big contradiction between my direct experience of life and what
would be possible under that kind of theory of physics.
Now I know better. There is a certain term, Z, which appears
BOTH in the Feynman path version of quantum mechanics and in my new stochastic
path version. The math of these versions is similar on the surface, but they
lead to different predictions (and different options for technology). Still,
both have this term Z. In “common sense”
(a different kind of common sense, which I should perhaps call “inner
subjective understanding), Z is a destiny term. Understanding Z, in your gut,
is like understanding destiny and what it really means.
The new story about Z reminds me a lot of the story of
another simple-looking mathematical function, J, which I learned about as an
undergraduate at Harvard, in the 1960’s. Feynman’s Z is known to lots of people now,
just as J was well known in the world of optimization and optimal control back
then. Engineers would say “Oh, J is just a minor technical term we use in
solving inventory control problems. It’s basically just ‘cost to go.” But in
trying to understand how intelligence works in the brain, I was the first to
realize that J, or approximate J, is actually the mathematical basis of what we
call hopes and fears, and “secondary reinforcement.” Hopes and fears are
absolutely central to the human mind. It’s
a lot more than inventory control. (For more of that story, see the Handbook of
Reinforcement Learning and Approximate Dynamic Programming, edited by Lewis and
Liu, from IEEE/Wiley. Or just look at www.werbos.com/mind.htm.)
Understanding hopes and fears and how they work is really essential to
understanding any kind of mind or brain. Now – it turns out that Z is just as
important, and more than I appreciated before this past month.
Is it possible to “change the past” in a really significant
way? I basically assumed it could not be possible, in a 3+1-D universe. Like
Einstein… I misunderstood my own math. I thought that the science fiction novel
Chronoliths gave a good picture of what that math tells us. I thought that that
my 3+1-D math fit what Connie Willis called “the Oxford standard model of time
travel” in her two-volume novel Blackout/AllClear. But now I know better,
simply because I worked out an example. Of course, I am only just BEGINNING to
know better, and I don’t claim to have the new deal totally mastered! Lots more
to learn better!
In a way… I owe thanks to Bernard Widrow, Marlan Scully and
Chris Altman for jogging me in ways that helped me understand better. (If you
google on either of the first two names, you will see I have reasons to be very
grateful for the gentle guidance I received from them.)
Widrow and Scully both gently suggested a general approach
to coming down to earth from the worlds of mathematical abstraction which were
the main foundations of my intellectual life. Scully’s encouragement got me to
work out the concrete examples of a new formulation of physics which I have
written this past year (as well as publish more details of a new type of P
formalism beyond the scope of this simple blog post). Following that track, I forced myself to do
the mundane job of working out the
continuous time equations for what happens to a photon going through a polaroid
type polarizer – a rather mundane thing, but someone had to do it, and I was
unable to get anyone else to do it (though I tried). The equations which I came up with are
explained in some detail in a paper posted at vixra.org, and in a more complete
paper forthcoming in the International Journal of Bifurcation and Chaos, March
2015.
As I worked out those equations… I could not help
empathizing a bit with that poor little photon going through a polarizer. After
all, Washington D.C. is also a very polarizing environment. That’s not a joke.
It’s very serious.
To make it work, I had to be very clear that the photon essentially
had three possible actions it could take, aside from doing nothing, at every
instant of its life in that polarizer. It could spin itself around to perfectly
match the spin that the polarizer wanted of it. Or it could go 90 degrees
against the prevailing direction, and get totally eaten up. Or it could “scream”
that “I don’t want to be in this situation”, and change the destiny term Z such
that this whole scenario would be much less likely to arise in the first place.
In a sense, it could change the past (with some probability) to prevent the
situation altogether.
I did not take this serious at the time, but it seemed like
a wonderful joke. New forces have appeared in the executive branch of the US
government this past year, which are very much like that polarizer. What to do,
when facing a choice between totally aligning with the spin of the new order,
or being eaten altogether? Certainly the
option of screaming inside myself was
part of the game. (But actually one must be very careful about doing that, “even
just” within one’s own mind.)
But now, as I reflect on other situations… I realize… why
should human minds, in their fullest capability, be less capable than photons? Even if we give up “multiverse” theories of
physics, which assume that parallel time tracks really do exist… the
mathematics of multiple scenarios competing for probability (either in my stochastic
path physics or in the more classical Feynman path physics) can have a similar
effect, to minds embedded in such a universe. The weird thing is that this is
true even if the stochastic path effects result from “deterministic” models
like the mathematics of Einstein! If you ever feel a bit nervous looking at
Einstein-type nonlinear field equations, and you worry that you might be
missing something… please remember that even Einstein himself did not fully
understand all the implications of equations which he himself formulated!
And now… as I have other things to do this New Year’s day,
let me just repost an email I sent a day or two ago to Yeshua Ben David:
Good morning, Yeshua!
Today, in the time when I still
have energy to think out of the box, my priority is to rewrite that cosmology
paper on consciousness and the physics of time, to try to improve the impact
somewhat. But before I do... it is interesting to think a bit more about
the larger picture.
I am very grateful for a
tolerant ear, of someone who will be willing to put up with someone who does
not see reality in the same way as many others.
Centuries ago, if a person
rejected every part of life that he could not yet understand in a fully
mathematical way, he would not be listened to much. he would be lucky to
survive at all. Yet, as our mathematical knowledge has grown... a good thing...
there has been a bad side effect of people rejecting and forcibly ignoring all
else. I often think about George Valliant's discussion of the various types of
defense mec hanisms which pervade our culture. I see such bad tendencies in
myself too... but, being aware of them, I at least try to keep them under
control while so many others fall gleefully into things which may destroy
them... and the rest of us as well.
But... beyond what I understand
mathematically... well, there is also a zone of things I can understand but not
discuss.
Sometimes I feel so frustrated
with the DOZENS of levels of compartmentalization which seem necessary in
today's world here -- some due to differences in disciplines, some cultures,
some matters of safety.
Yet... many years ago, I was an
active member of the Rosicrucian order, and read through a lot of their old
stuff, which includes stuff going back millennia. I remember one viewpoint...
that the lowest level stuff is open, and ALSO the highest stuff, because it
gives positive benefit for those who can truly understand it and not so much
harm to those who don't. "The middle stuff is the problem," they
said.
Our mathematical understanding
of intelligent systems in general -- brains and minds and what we could build
-- is one of the most important threads for the destiny of the human species.
Yet, in the larger space, I do not really know where we are going with that
thread.
Back in 1991 (I think, after
IJCNN Seattle), I listened to advice from Boeing, and saw Terminator II. I am
glad I did, even though I did not enjoy the movie. I have a post on that on my
obscure personal blog. Since then, I have been fully aware of a need to walk a
tightrope... to try to develop the kind of mathematical understanding which
would be crucial to full human potential and spiritual existence, while
avoiding the dangers of losing the human species. Thus I put major effort into
promoting the COPN topic at NSF, focused on developing that understanding. (see
www.nsf.gov.)
When the attack of 7/14/14 hit
me, in this place... well... I have not yet fully absorbed all the many-level
implications of that huge shock. I certainly do think of it as a multi-level
situation, where it would be misleading to think only of one level.
On a deep level... the attack
did occur just hours after my return to NSF from WCCI, and a major implication
will be to terminate not only intelligent systems technology but also central
elements of hope to understand the brain better. (Of course, many will
still wave the flag of these things, as well as the flags of openness and
transparency and accountability and the future of humans in space and so on...
but accomplishing things in reality requires a wee bit more than PR.) I
have wondered very intensely: should I take this as a signal that I was walking
a bit too close to one side of the tightrope, risking negative misuse of
knowledge? Several lines of evidence supported that. Though I have also
wondered: why then, would reality tolerate the intense efforts, just as
dangerous, to develop "Star Wars clone army" brain helmets?
In the meantime... I understand
time a little better this week than I did two weeks ago. Perhaps I ought to put
in a paragraph or two in the revised paper to give some hint of that better
understanding.
At www.werbos.com/quantum.htm, I give the link to
the directory where the slides and audio of my Australia talk are located. But I
also have some level of draft of my work on CMRFp, the new continuous time
model of polaroid type polarizers, which is also posted at vixra and in press
at IJBC. In the past two weeks, I have had a chance to digest more fully the
meaning of the new math.
In the past, I have wondered at
times: is it possible to change the past or not? Of course, we have not seen
anything at all like that in the physics lab. Following the constraints
explained by Thomas Kuhn, for third person science, we basically cannot even
discuss that subject in normal scientific venues.
Yet on a first person level...
I have a list of about eight personal experiences which seem to say that maybe
we can. That is one of the main reasons why I report the feeling (in my
time/consciousness paper) that there is only a 10% chance that the cosmos is
only 3+1-D.
Yet now, for the past two
weeks... I now realize that the emergent phenomena possible is a large, complex
3+1-D space are much richer than I had assumed... even though I was aware of
more richness than most people already. I am reminded of the time when I was
very young, when I saw the theorem that the even numbers are a subset of all
integers... AND VICE-VERSA... by the curious was that holomorphism can work
with infinite systems.
In "reality", in a
3+1-D universe, only one scenario becomes real... yet the set of scenarios...
well, all the scenarios are "partially real" in the sense that they
interact, as per the "destiny term" Z. For intelligence embedded
within that kind of universe, it can OPERATIONALLY be like a type of
many-worlds situation.
I was more right than I
realized at first, in empathizing with that little photon with the power to
just dial down the entire scenario. Z is "just a scalar" -- but so is
J in dynamic programming. Scalar functions can contain a lot of information,
though I suppose I still have a lot to learn about that. Just as DHP goes 'way
beyond HDP and TD and Q, perhaps a gradient form of Z could be of use in better
understanding destiny effects and interfacing with intelligence.
But I digress.
I stopped to get a decaf
coffee... and received an email from IEEE about some kind of message from Elon
Musk. Back to Terminators...
When I saw Terminator II,. it
was a high-impact experience for me, because so many of the details exactly
matched what I was actually starting up at that time. Even the evil nanorobot
looked like an exact morph between me and the guy from Cyberdyne I was funding
to develop a new robot arm . I tried to calm myself down... and recalled that
the movie must have been filmed before all these new things had happened... and
then, the final scary thing for me was to see the final emphasis, that the
information was being sent back through time in order to help people prepare.
(later, when I met Luda, she reminded me at times of Sara... but that was
later.) I knew enough about the physics of time to take that a bit more
seriously than most people would.
At some level, my sense
for several years was that it was a near thing, in actuality, and that we
actually narrowly avoided something which "actually happened" at some
level, like a living scenario.
This past year... I began to
downplay that idea... since I have learned some crucial tricks which I didn't
know back then, important to really fully doing the scariest stuff. (Yet even
what I knew then could be very scary even now in the wrong places and the wrong
hands).
=======
And then, last Saturday, the
final event for us in a long family Christmas sequence (unless we will get a
visit from others in College Park).
My eldest son drove me and
Chris to a 3D IMAX showing of the Hobbit, the final episode. Mostly just
relaxing fun, typical stuff... though I could draw a crude analogy to the dwarf
place under the mountain and the place where I am sitting now, and my hope to get
out before the various armies start killing each other. But ...before that...
multiple 3D IMAX trailers for things to come.
One -- a major new remake of
the Terminator II kind of story. This time, the evil robot is Asian. This
reminds me... the events of 7/14/14 will thoroughly expunge the relevant
technology in the US, but China is moving ahead faster than ever, now WITHOUT
whatever steering influence I might have had, and Xi Jinping is clearly having
some difficulties in coping with the tightropes he needs to walk. It is
more than a balancing act really, as there is also a need for synergy between
things being balanced; a fuzzy middle is not the highest form of harmony. They
have not been able to think out of the box more effectively in learning lessons
form Hong Kong (which SHOULD be less painful for them than 7./14/14 was for
me... but it takes special discipline to be truly constructive in the face of
such pains.)
OK, that was a zinger.
But...
well... there are levels and
levels in the noosphere, even of this narcissistic silly little blue marble.
And thoughts from other levels, however compartmentalized, do tend to have
reflections at times, to leak out. I THINK I saw a trailer... about a new movie
from The Matrix guy... about discussions beyond this marble of "the
harvest." Interesting. I wonder.
But now... back to the
task of the morning.
Best regards,
Paul
P.S. The afternoon will be more
technical things... from computers to packing up to nanofabrication. This email
is my new "NSF alter ego," though maybe my access to it at NSF will
be compromised if I install Thunderbird as my client for it at home; NSF
permissions will not let me use Thunderbird here. So many levels of
compartmentalization!
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