questions of the day: cats, IMP and Tibetan mask of the dead

For me, today is a day of questions. Actually, I have spent MANY of my days "banging my head against the wall" on tough questions I had not answer for, which no one else had answers for either. I decided this was a major part of my own personal mission or calling early on, when I observed how many brilliant people would slide away or cheat on some basic questions. This was reinforced a lot when I found I really could answer some questions others gave up on (like how to train a simple neural network, which Minsky thought was impossible, but that was just one small example). Today's society tends to reward people who do the opposite, who give up asking questions and spend their lives as salesmen, which convinced me all the more that SOMEONE needs to fill the vacuum.

As a general matter, the job of a knowledge worker is to input, to process, and to output -- ALL THREE. That middle stage deserves more respect..

But whatever.

So this morning... in my early morning meditative state... yes, I know I know lots of stuff no one else does, but three images come to mind demanding that I think hard and try to sort things out better:

(1) the Schrodinger cat;

(2) the Integrated Market Platform (IMP) proposal;

and (3) the new Tibetan Mask of the Dead which I saw when wandering around Kathmandu
(weirder than the incident I mentioned before in front of the Pashupatinath Temple).

The literature on macroscopic Schrodinger cats is pretty overwhelming.  In fact, maybe I should post here what I sent the Vedanta list a few days back:

************************************************************************
***************************************************************************
Meow!

Vinod and Stan made the reasonable request that I send again the link
to a review of the massive empirical literature on macroscopic
Schrodinger cats. I am responding on a new thread, mainly because I
don't want to have to repeat this process again. To find what I sent
before, I used "search" in the "sent" email directory of gmail, and
used "print all" to save to pdf, and used the superior search
capabilities in adobe reader to locate what I sent you before! (Life
was so much easier when I could use Eudora 7 as my email package!) I
will tell you exactly how I found the stuff, so that you won't be so
dependent on me in future.

The best review book I found before, and sent you, was:

https://www.amazon.com/Macroscopic-Quantum-Coherence-Computing/dp/0306465655

I believe that the massive news about macroscopic Schordinger cats
emerged from a seminal paper in Nature:

https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v406/n6791/full/406043a0.html

I have to admit I do not see the name "Nakamura" there. I learned
about the paper in Nature at a very large conference on quantum
information technology, supported by multiple agencies of the US
government, where this new result was THE big new thing, the hit of
the conference. That's where I heard people give credit to Nakamura,
but I don 't see his name in my searches so far!!

Since the issue of quantum measurement is at the center of "KQED
versus MQED versus earlier stuff," I feel I have a duty to mention
another paper more suitable for experts by a very thoughtful guy
respected in quantum computing, who gives a very different  informed
view of things we have debated:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0105127.pdf

This morning I repeated the kind of search which led me to find that
first book (which I have not read, as I rely more on piles of journal
articles and such). I went to scholar.google.com, and simply searched
on "macroscopic Schrodinger cat." Then I clicked on "cited by.." under
the most highly cited paper, to get a list of more recent papers which
cite that one. This is a really important trick, to find the most
current literature and what it says about a classic paper like
Friedman's paper in Nature. This pointed to a slightly older book, but
probably a lot more definitive in this area:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1590332245/

(You don't have to buy the book to get a picture of what's going on
from that web page!)

But to get a real picture, there is no substitute for the primary
literature, the vast collection of papers (more recent especially)
which are also available for free more than half the time on the web.
(Notice that even without "advanced search", Google Scholar lets you
specify a range of dates.) A nice example is:

http://www.mdpi.com/2304-6732/3/4/57/htm

By the way, this example is based on Circuit QED, which is a recent
extension of Cavity QED (CQED), which I mention only briefly in the
review section of http://vixra.org/abs/1707.0343. Once macroscopic
Schrodinger cats moved from theory to experiment to known physics, the
next stage was engineering. Most of the engineering of macroscopic
Schrodinger cats has been within the field of quantum information
science and technology (QuiST), and that is why the examples are
mainly in electronics and photonics lately. But there is an example
out there in the chemistry of large molecules (think DNA), and lots of
work in China which it is a little harder to obtain on the web,
perhaps because of their new national security push on QuIST or
perhaps because they promised to act more like US on matters of IP.

For those of you interested in the more humanistic question "what is
it like to integrate one's consciousness or soul ACROSS patches?" I am
in the middle of an awful but easy to read novel which basically does
address that issue:

https://www.amazon.com/All-Our-Wrong-Todays-Novel/dp/1101985135/

(It is interesting that I never saw a novel before which addressed
that question in the present tense, and it appears just now. The Dune
series addressed the question in future tense, for a mundane brain

********************************************************************************************
******************************************************************************************

OK, that's pretty straightforward at the level of what we really know from the experimentally solid part of quantum field theory, quantum electrodynamics (QED). But what if we believe (as I still generally do) in the idea that QED can be derived as a statistical approximation (good until we see things smaller than 3 femtometers) to the emergent behavior of a more Einstein-style field theory? How could an Einstein type field theory give rise to macroscopic Schrodinger cats? I have posted my initial thoughts on that here on this blog...  but I am wondering how certain I should be, and what clear possibilities I should be considering?

I have also mentioned the need for IMP here, and am very disappointed that the echoes so far have been inadequate... things that wouldn't work. Yet in all fairness, having the world run by an automated market platform sounds cold and scary, even though it is the best I (or anyone else) have come up with so far. Is it just a matter of filling in gaps in the story and the dissemination and getting used to it (as I got used to Schrodinger cats, more or less)? Or is something deeper required?

Yesterday, when I was stuck for a few minutes in a parking lot, I googled "Heisenberg Gopi Krishna", and found some interesting stuff, as expected. I am not moved to probe that part of the past more now, but maybe that was part of what brought the mask of the dead to mind now. This was the second time a meeting with a mask of the dead intersected a significant time in my life... the previous being 1973 or so... but then again aren't all the times significant? But this one had a different face, reminding me a bit of Turki Faisal and the assumption dream last night. 

Must run... and think... 

*************************************************************************************************************

One more:
On Mon, Oct 30, 2017 at 8:08 AM, Andris Heks <a.heks@hotmail.com> wrote:

Dear Bruno, If you perceive the absolute as personal, I cannot understand why you continue with an impersonal 'machine' model assumption. Surely, a 'living organism' would be a more appropriate model.

=========================

It is important that we not put too much trust in specific words when we try to grapple with such tricky things beyond the level of mundane ordinary life.

What does "personal" mean anyway? I have argued that an Einstein/Lagrange optimization model of the cosmos may well be "personal" or "superpersonal," with one reasonable usage of those words, even though it would ALSO fit common ideas of what a "mechanical" or "materialistic" model would be!! What matters is NOT the position we take in a debate for or against such a word, which gives at best a fuzzy picture of the reality which it tries to describe, but the more precise understanding we develop.

Yet in truth, I find myself called this morning to think twice even about the tentative more precise understanding I have developed, in part by considering questions people have raised here.

For example -- what difference does it make whether the true Lagrangian is MAXIMIZED, or if it can only be described as a MINMAX operation (which sounds a bit Zoroastrian!), or that it might be MAX or MINMAX subject to equality constraints (a crucial feature of simple Maxwell's Laws, a crucial axiom, often mischaracterized in discussions of the underlying assumptions of a field theory). Does life exist "between the fire and the ice," between hard fixed points and stochastic "heat death", requiring a minmax kind of situation, making the cosmos less "personal" than one might imagine? And are we REALLY just possible scenarios of a PDE model? What is the real meaning of those Schrodinger cats? How would I look at all this if I did NOT include personal experience, which must always be taken with caution (as there are many many ways that strange things can happen)? 

All for now.

Of courses, none of this raises questions about noosphere and galaxy, which are still there in any case.