[HN Gopher] Maps Of Matter
___________________________________________________________________
Maps Of Matter
Author : optimalsolver
Score : 90 points
Date : 2021-06-29 09:44 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (futureofmatter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (futureofmatter.com)
| pianoben wrote:
| I just want to say that this website is _beautiful_. It 's
| visually pleasing and spare. The HTML is purely semantic, and the
| CSS is no more than necessary.
|
| To me, this is an ideal web page. Hats off to the author!
| carapace wrote:
| (I hate to be _that guy_ but a flywheel is an energy storage
| device, not a positive feedback loop.)
| asplake wrote:
| > Put another way: the conventional use of "emergent" has a
| rather passive flavour. What I'm talking about is a much more
| active imaginative stance, the kind of stance taken by people
| like Bret Victor or Satoshi or Picasso.
|
| "generative"?
| beaconstudios wrote:
| I think generative art could be emergent in future, but as far
| as I'm aware it isn't currently. The best examples of designed
| emergence we have right now are cellular automata, like
| Conway's Game of Life, or Primordial particle systems
| (https://youtu.be/makaJpLvbow).
| asplake wrote:
| Yes, though word is much broader in application than that.
| See for example generative design [1]. Pattern languages
| also, and the deliberate juxtaposition of things as a
| creative catalyst. Sort of in line with the article I have
| two metaphors for that idea in the knowledge creation arena:
| "Throwing things into the Great Model Collider" and "One
| model to the tune of another".
| Tepix wrote:
| The essay claims we have a solid understanding of the basic rules
| of physics. I'm not a physicist but my impression is that we
| don't know a lot and are missing some essential parts. Black
| matter and black energy anyone?
|
| Perhaps our model of a world is missing a few dimensions which
| makes it hard to understand what is going on.
|
| Related: https://www.collective-
| evolution.com/2013/07/02/flatland-und...
| tgragnato wrote:
| > Speculative, and likely contains errors, misconceptions, and
| omissions; thoughtful, informed comments are welcome. Intended
| for a general scientifically curious audience, not requiring
| much detailed specialist background.
|
| I enjoyed the reading, it is well written. Like you, I think
| there is a bit too much speculation to consider it an article
| suitable for a "scientifically curious audience". From my point
| of view the parallels and the "connections" between phylogeny,
| elements, matter and physics make it very little pseudo-
| scientific and too metaphysical.
| goldenkey wrote:
| You mean dark matter and dark energy.
|
| String theory posits 10+ dimensions but they would be extremely
| tiny (compactified is the term) and cyclic so all objects would
| travel through them in a modular way. Like, if you walked to
| the end of your bedroom, you'd have gone through these
| dimensions something like 10^100 times again and again like a
| clock hand going around.
|
| But experiments with gravity and light supposedly show no loss
| of energy or speed and other metrics, that would indicate some
| other hidden dimensions where energy could be absorbed/trapped.
|
| It's possible these other dimensions have extremely high vacuum
| states so they repel any incoming energy packets..but who
| really knows?
|
| In any case, we know plenty enough to start crafting new
| combinations of atoms to create room temperature
| superconductors. Fabrication techniques have to get better. We
| should be testing 10000000 compounds every day. If we had room
| temperature superconductors we could have CPUs, GPUs, and other
| such transistor based technology running at 1000s of GHz. The
| only reason we can't do that now is because of the heat given
| off by the resistance of the materials we are currently using
| to build these circuits!
|
| Overclocking culture used to put liquid nitrogen on Pentium 4s
| and get em up to 10+GHz. Fun but not sustainable. Just evidence
| that the thermal envelope is the true problem for current
| single core clock speeds.
|
| A room temperature superconductor would change computing
| forever. It is in my opinion, the thing we should be focusing
| all our material science and physics efforts on. Computers that
| are 1000s of times faster would allow us to take machine
| learning, and by extension, artificial intelligence, to a new
| frontier.
| andreareina wrote:
| The more complete claim is that we understand the _fundamental_
| laws of physics _as they pertain to everyday life_. The
| qualifications are important. Fundamental because being able to
| predict the interactions of a handful of particles doesn 't
| automatically lead to visibility of the large-scale behavior.
| An example of this is protein folding: we know how proteins
| fold, but finding out how to get a particular shape basically
| requires brute-forcing the search space. Everyday life excludes
| dark {matter,energy} as well as quantum gravity and anything
| that requires the energies of large particle accelerators to
| probe.
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| I like that he is thinking in a bold way and hope it leads to
| something productive, but it seems like nearly all of this
| physics will be unverifiable and will remain theoretical. He's
| talking about physics at time scales and conditions that are not
| found naturally earth and that require a tremendous amount of
| energy to produce.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| >With sufficiently good tweezers and a lot of patience you could
| reassemble a human being into a bicycle of comparable mass; and
| vice versa.
|
| Considering that there is no material distinction between a
| living person and a dead body, I would say that this view is
| perhaps overly reductive. The matter of the body is essential,
| but not sufficient; life is fundamentally a process driven by
| autopoietic processes, which you would need to initiate in order
| to have anything meaningful.
|
| Being is uninteresting without becoming, state without change is
| just dead.
| [deleted]
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| I enjoyed reading your other comments maybe out of implicit
| bias, and this is tangential maybe, but just the same I'm
| curious about what you make of Nima Arkani-Hamed's recent work
| --namely amplituhedrons--in this larger context.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| it's way beyond me; my grasp of quantum mechanics is at a
| slightly-beyond-pop level. My road into the systems memeplex
| was from trying to understand my own intuitions about
| software engineering and wicked problems in the social space.
| From there it's been mostly philosophy with a little bit of
| maths.
| goldenkey wrote:
| > Considering that there is no material distinction between a
| living person and a dead body
|
| When someone dies, information is lost. With cell death comes
| loss of structure. Unless we can use their existing DNA to
| repair the damage, the person will remain dead. And even if
| revived, their brain's memories might still have been severely
| compromised. Especially if, like what you hint at, the process
| of electricity flowing in the brain is the actual memory
| itself, an ongoing process. It's certainly possible that if the
| process is halted, the memory is lost. Just like DRAM.
|
| At the moment it's pretty much a mystery. But I agree, OP
| assumes a lot about structure over process. Zen says everything
| is a function, not an object. And by nesting functions, we get
| everything...
|
| Memory and consciousness really have no reason to be entirely
| structural. A lot of things actually don't. Our old computer
| memory technology was actually just delay line memory. Perhaps
| our brain works in a similar way to some extent.
|
| The universe itself, in most respects, is made out of stable
| processes that we abstract as objects. An atom is really just a
| process of energy flowing in a specific way through space over
| time, repetitively. Upset the process and you get a nuclear
| explosion which most of us would consider an event or
| process...not an object. So was the energy of the atom ever
| really an object in the first place? No, it was like a candle
| flame. Constantly kindling itself, of different oxygen and fuel
| from moment to moment. Yet we gave it a name and an identity.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay_line_memory
| beaconstudios wrote:
| Yes I totally agree. My perspective comes from a mix of zen
| and systems/cybernetics; matter and other temporarily stable
| configurations like life are stable attractors in the state
| of energy flow. So the fundamental essence of reality is
| energy, rather than matter. The difference been transient
| energy like "events" and static-appearing things like matter
| is that the latter is constantly maintaining itself in a
| feedback loop.
|
| Believing it to be matter is a mistake, and one that leads
| you to misleading metaphysical beliefs like the idea in the
| article above, or that all qualities can be reduced to
| quantities, or all things can be understood by looking at the
| pieces that it is made of.
|
| It's strange to me that materialism is still such a popular
| belief amongst people who consider themselves rational,
| because even the origin point of that belief (the atomistic
| view of physics) fell apart at the hands of quantum
| mechanics.
| feanaro wrote:
| Many people professing to be materialists are actually
| physicalists. The claim is not that everything that matters
| is matter. Rather it's that everything that matters is
| physical state.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| If you (not you personally, the general 'you') still
| believe that reductionism can explain all phenomena then
| even if you claim to be a physicalist, you are still
| stuck in materialist patterns of thinking.
| Koshkin wrote:
| > _belief (the atomistic view of physics) fell apart_
|
| What is this, then?
|
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/see-the-
| highest-r...
| beaconstudios wrote:
| it's not that atoms don't exist, it's that atoms are the
| smallest part of reality - that they are _indivisible_.
| That 's what atomism is.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomism
| Koshkin wrote:
| Actually, atoms may well be the smallest parts of reality
| that we can ever "see." Structureless particles such as
| electrons are "points" which, due to their infinitely
| small size, makes them impossible to see even in
| principle. (Incidentally, this is exactly makes them true
| "atoms," i.e. indivisible, and they are always created
| and destroyed as a whole.)
| danparsonson wrote:
| > It's strange to me that materialism is still such a
| popular belief amongst people who consider themselves
| rational, because even the origin point of that belief (the
| atomistic view of physics) fell apart at the hands of
| quantum mechanics.
|
| Why does QM contradict materialism? I understood
| materialism to be the opposite of spiritual beliefs rather
| than being about strictly Newtonian physics (although I
| guess that's how it started). Quantum mechanics describes
| the behaviour of matter and therefore is surely central to
| a materialist world view? What would be the correct word to
| describe the view that consciousness is the result of
| physical processes? I thought that was materialism.
|
| > So the fundamental essence of reality is energy, rather
| than matter.
|
| They're basically the same thing though, yes? E=mc^2 and
| all that?
| beaconstudios wrote:
| You're thinking of physicalism, of which materialism is a
| sub-category. Physicalism is the assertion that there are
| no supernatural phenomena (which I agree with);
| materialism suggests that the essence that everything is
| built out of is matter. I think most people would agree
| that materialism is outdated (given that atomism has been
| outdated for >100 years), but many of the implications of
| materialism (that the whole can be explained by the
| parts, ie reductionism, and the idea that all important
| properties can be quantified, as two examples) still
| persist.
|
| The (superior) alternative to materialism is emergentism.
| Materialism and emergentism both imply other ideas and
| ways of thinking about the world, which are the actual
| important things.
| nahuel0x wrote:
| I think there was a big intuitive glimpse of this in
| dialectical materialism (but not on the stalinist
| "diamat" flavor). "Levels" of reality emerge were each
| one has his own emergent "laws", there are intertwined
| mutual influence between "levels", phase transitions are
| emphasized, relationships are more important than
| objects, objects are always "contradictory" (always
| divisible and in flux) and really relationships in
| disguise, all "categories" we made in our mind as always
| transitional and imperfect, etc.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| Hegel is considered to be in the intellectual heritage of
| systems theory, AFAIK.
| nahuel0x wrote:
| I think systems theory can be directly traced to
| Bogdanov's "tektology", and he surely was aware of Hegel
| works.
| [deleted]
| danparsonson wrote:
| Ah OK. I think you're splitting hairs a little bit there
| - I would consider those two terms (materialism and
| physicalism) to be interchangeable; the basic idea is the
| same but one is a refinement of the other using modern
| knowledge. You could say physicalism is materialism v2
| :-)
|
| As for emergentism... that's materialism v3, so (in my
| head at least) these are all different ways of saying the
| same thing.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| yeah that's fair - the problem in my mind isn't that
| people are using the wrong word (who cares!), but that
| even though we know that matter isn't the essence of
| reality now, we still have many other beliefs that are
| dependent on that belief, that we haven't moved on from.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| I don't follow.
|
| > _many of the implications of materialism (...)
| reductionism_
|
| Is reductionism considered a consequence of materialism?
| To me, the two seem independent. Reductionism works just
| as well for abstract concepts as it does for physical
| matter.
|
| > _the idea that all important properties can be
| quantified_
|
| I'm not sure how this follows from materialism either. We
| quantify many things that have nothing to do with
| physical matter.
|
| I also get the feeling that you consider these two
| "implications of materialism" to be outdated - I disagree
| with that view. For instance, I can't think of an example
| of a property or phenomena that is best left not
| quantified - there are plenty of important things in life
| that we can't quantify _yet_ , because we lack the
| measurement tools or conceptual framework for it, but
| quantifying these is obviously doable in principle, and
| desirable.
| danparsonson wrote:
| Regarding quantifying everything - at a quantum
| mechanical level, all is not totally quantifiable, and
| that's fundamental. See
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle. I
| assume this is what the parent was referring to.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| That is part of it, yes.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| > Is reductionism considered a consequence of
| materialism?
|
| It is; fundamentally the theory is that the world is made
| up of lego bricks, so we can examine the world by looking
| at the pieces. This is a useful tool, but it doesn't
| actually work in all cases. For example, the areas of
| science where this does work are considered "hard
| sciences", and the areas that it doesn't are considered
| "soft sciences".
|
| Reductionism isn't outdated in the sense that it is
| useless; it's outdated in the sense that it cannot be
| used to understand all phenomena, especially emergent
| phenomena. Systems science is and has been creating new
| tools that can be applied to understand emergent
| phenomena.
|
| I don't want to get too navel-gazy with this, but there
| are many things that defy quantification, or our efforts
| at quantification are and can only ever be procrustean in
| nature. That doesn't mean that they cannot be modelled,
| but that the modelling must be process-oriented rather
| than state-oriented. For example, if you are modelling
| the behaviour of a thermometer at the level of its
| components, you can model the causal relationships
| between heater and sensor as a self-correcting feedback
| loop - this is a qualitative model. Only at the level of
| the total behaviour can you model the ambient temperature
| and desired temperature quantitatively.
|
| Am I making sense here? I'm still working my way through
| the textbooks for some of these concepts so sometimes I
| find it difficult to put into words.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| My core objection is, the way I see it, reductionism
| doesn't stop working for soft sciences in any fundamental
| way. There's no fundamental irreducibility of a
| phenomenon (uncertainty principle notwithstanding, soft
| sciences aren't anywhere near worrying about that); the
| limit is our computational capacity - of our brains, of
| our computers, of our scientific discourse. We just can't
| keep so many pieces in our heads simultaneously, so we
| don't bother, and create higher-level abstractions to
| make things easier on ourselves.
|
| That's how I view emergence too: there's no new behavior
| suddenly appearing when your system is complex enough,
| behavior that couldn't be predicted from looking at the
| pieces - it's just _too much work_ to deal with pieces
| directly. The discontinuity we see doesn 't exists in the
| real world - it's caused by the rungs of our ladder of
| abstraction.
|
| As an example of the rungs on the ladder: we study gases
| on a molecular level, modelling them as bouncy balls. We
| also study gases at a higher level, modelling them as
| fluids. We go further still, viewing them as a bunch of
| parameters (pressure, volume, temperature). Three
| different perspectives, three separate set of behaviors -
| yet there's no actual discontinuity in the real world,
| and a lot of interesting phenomena can be observed when
| we try to create a smooth transition between the models;
| that is, we look in between the rungs.
|
| > _For example, if you are modelling the behaviour of a
| thermometer at the level of its components, you can model
| the causal relationships between heater and sensor as a
| self-correcting feedback loop - this is a qualitative
| model. Only at the level of the total behaviour can you
| model the ambient temperature and desired temperature
| quantitatively._
|
| The way I see it, casual models have only a coarse
| relationship with the real world. A self-correcting
| feedback loop can be analyzed in terms of its conceptual
| components, which are mathematical in nature - but you
| won't get from here to predicting the behavior of a real-
| world thermostat until you start plugging in physical
| models. How much complexity you'll have to deal with
| depends on the physical model you plug in. There's lots
| of space for reduction and quantification here, depending
| on the answers you seek. For example, the concept of
| "ambient temperature" is a very high-level abstraction in
| itself - if you're willing to break it apart, suddenly a
| lot more things across the model become more directly
| related to the real world, and easier to quantify.
|
| ---
|
| The point I'm trying to express here is, in my view,
| there are three types of limits to reductionism and
| quantification:
|
| - The Uncertainty Principle - the fundamental limit,
| around which you can't quantify some things.
| IANAPhysicist, but my feeling is, it's not a principled
| limit to quantification - it only reveals that we're
| trying to quantify measures that are ill-defined.
|
| - Fundamental limits to computation - I'm thinking of the
| Halting Problem, Godel's Incompleteness Theorems. We
| can't create quantitative metrics and build reductive
| models in ways that are uncomputable.
|
| - Practical limits, aka. too hard to bother - this is
| what I believe is 99% of common arguments against
| reductionism and examples of emergence. We look at
| systems as a whole, because looking at pieces is too much
| work. But whether it's too much for our working memory,
| or too much for all computing power of our civilization -
| it's still not a _fundamental_ , philosophical limit, and
| therefore not a philosophical argument against
| reductionism.
|
| On that last point, if one can prove that a higher-
| granularity model would require more compute than the
| universe could provide over its lifetime, then I'll give
| it a solid shmaybe as a fundamental limit.
|
| ---
|
| Addendum on systems science.
|
| I have an interest in systems science, which I pursue to
| the extent my free time allows. I've studied the basics,
| done some toy modelling, and one thing I've learned so
| far is: the most insightful part of modelling a system is
| _plugging numbers into it_.
|
| For example, see:
| https://insightmaker.com/insight/206860/Musings-on-a-HN-
| comm.... It was my attempt to push numbers through a
| system model I first described on HN. The working,
| executable model is on the left, for the conceptual one
| and original HN comment, scroll to the right. Extra
| commentary:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26137264.
|
| I now no longer trust models that aren't executable -
| it's too easy to create something that looks fine in the
| abstract, but is completely wrong. Making it run on real
| - quantified - data is the fastest way to discover the
| depths of one's ignorance, like I did in the example
| linked above.
|
| (Well, to be honest, 80% of my ignorance was revealed by
| defining _units of measurement_ for each sink and flow -
| so if you want a quick way to debullshit a systems model,
| I suggest starting with that.)
| jchanimal wrote:
| There is logically a position between determinism and
| dualism. See
| https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/anomalous-monism/
| beaconstudios wrote:
| > That's how I view emergence too: there's no new
| behavior suddenly appearing when your system is complex
| enough, behavior that couldn't be predicted from looking
| at the pieces - it's just too much work to deal with
| pieces directly. The discontinuity we see doesn't exists
| in the real world - it's caused by the rungs of our
| ladder of abstraction.
|
| Reductionism relies on dissecting the whole and viewing
| the parts individually. The fundamental distinction
| between something that can be reduced (let's call it a
| collection) and something that cannot (a system), is that
| when you dissect a system, a fundamental aspect of the
| system is lost. That isn't to say that said aspect has
| materialised of its own accord, but that it originates
| with the relationships between the parts. There is no
| seat of "car-ness" in a car, and if you were to try to
| understand a car by looking at the individual parts, you
| would not be able to unless you could intuit how those
| parts interact. The difference between an engineered
| system and a natural system is that in engineering we
| intentionally attempt to minimise the number of
| interrelations so that the object can be understood
| easily from an analytical perspective. In natural
| systems, the levels of interconnection are much greater;
| we cannot understand a society by examining each
| individual in isolation, we have to move up the ladder of
| abstraction to a level where coherent patterns can be
| identified. We have to look at the whole.
|
| The thing that reductionism misses out on is non-linear
| causality. Feedback loops, inherently based in
| relationships between parts and not the parts themselves,
| give rise to higher-order behaviour, which brings us the
| concept of levels of abstraction. The classic idea of
| reductionism is that if we create the lowest-level model
| (at this point that would be quantum mechanics, but it
| could certainly go lower in future), then we can derive
| all the higher-order models from that. This may be
| theoretically possible (purely in the philosophical
| sense), but it's just not practically useful. The
| position of reductionism is that this is the only (or
| perhaps primary) valid way in which models can be
| constructed.
|
| > The way I see it, casual models are almost completely
| abstract - they have only a coarse relationship with the
| real world. A self-correcting feedback loop can be
| analyzed in terms of its conceptual components, which are
| mathematical in nature - but you won't get from here to
| predicting the behavior of a real-world thermostat until
| you start plugging in physical models.
|
| This is true of all models - "all models are wrong, but
| some are useful", "the map is not the territory", etc.
| Modelling reality inherently involves reducing it to the
| parts we're interested in, because a model of reality in
| its entirety would be the same size as reality itself,
| and thus unrepresentable (even if we could capture the
| total state of reality). A basic equation for Newtonian
| motion excludes things like drag, the variability of
| gravity, turbulence and so on. The closer we need to get
| to matching reality, the more factors we need to include
| until the model transitions from mathematical to a
| simulation, by sheer necessity. The amount of detail we
| include depends on what we're trying to do; models are
| purposive tools rather than descriptions of reality.
|
| I think the name of reductionism does not help when
| discussing it; to reject reductionism is not to reject
| modelling, because we cannot operate in the world without
| models.
|
| I agree that the argument is a philosophical one. The
| reductionist perspective is one of objectivism; science
| measures reality, and thus lower-order models are more
| high-resolution and we can abstract away from a very-
| high-resolution map of reality by focusing on the details
| we care about. The emergentist perspective is
| constructivist; it states that our models are tools that
| we create in order to interact with our environment but
| they are not reality itself, and thus you should use the
| model that is most useful for interacting with the
| environment based on its predictive capability.
|
| [edit in response to your addendum]
|
| I totally agree that executable models (in essence,
| simulations) are 1000x better in basically every way than
| static models. I'm trying to work in this space myself in
| order to bring these ideas into software development. But
| I believe that plugging in the numbers is useful
| precisely because it highlights the qualitative aspects
| of the model; how different variables are causally
| related. The temporal (heh) aspect of the simulation
| highlights how the variables are bound, but the specific
| values whether they be 1000 or 10,000 units are not the
| thing you're learning, unless those values happen to be a
| divergence point in the model.
| namero999 wrote:
| Although emergentism doesn't solve the hard problem.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| The hard problem of consciousness?
| namero999 wrote:
| > It's strange to me that materialism is still such a
| popular belief amongst people who consider themselves
| rational, because even the origin point of that belief (the
| atomistic view of physics) fell apart at the hands of
| quantum mechanics.
|
| Well put. This boggles my mind too. It also seems to me
| that it should be evident that ultimately, either we rely
| on infinite regression (essentially explaining nothing) or
| at a certain point we pick an ontological primitive that we
| don't explain. And that our choice should be informed by
| how much of the known world can be explained in terms of
| such a primitive. I can't fathom what would lead anyone to
| choose matter for that purpose, and at the same time it
| seems like the mainstream, unquestioned choice.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| we don't even have the option of infinite regression
| because we cannot know the total state at a quantum
| level, both because of uncertainty and because quantum
| mechanics violate locality.
| simonh wrote:
| Firstly you're drawing an unwarranted distinction between
| physicalism and materialism. There is no consensus that
| there is a distinction, many philosophers consider them
| interchangeable, and there are competing accounts of
| possible distinctions.
|
| Materialism is not a theory of physics, it's a theory of
| the relationship between physics and various philosophical
| questions. Asserting that it's somehow incompatible with
| quantum mechanics is completely unwarranted. Bear in mind
| the term Physicalism wasn't even introduced into philosophy
| until the 1930s, long after quantum mechanics had become
| firmly established, and nobody with any credibility in
| philosophy was seriously suggesting then that quantum
| mechanics disproved materialism.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| > Firstly you're drawing an unwarranted distinction
| between physicalism and materialism.
|
| Let's not argue the definition of words then. The
| distinction I'm drawing is whether said philosophy
| believes that higher-order models of reality at any given
| level can be derived from understanding the smallest
| parts. The "yes" side, I'm calling materialism, but you
| could also call reductivism or perhaps objectivism. The
| "no" side, I'll call emergentism or constructivism.
| Neither side implies a supernatural aspect to reality.
|
| > Materialism is not a theory of physics, it's a theory
| of the relationship between physics and various
| philosophical questions. Asserting that it's somehow
| incompatible with quantum mechanics is just silly.
|
| Only if you're relying on the equivalence of materialism
| and physicalism. Quantum mechanics violated many ideas
| considered to be ground truth at the time, including
| locality and deterministic certainty. I'm far from an
| expert in this area, but my understanding is that the
| thing I'm calling materialism is dependent on the idea of
| the universe as a lego-style composition, and that
| quantum mechanics violate this concept. But this view is
| also espoused by Fritjof Capra, a particle physicist.
| Perhaps somebody should tell him that it's silly!
| simonh wrote:
| All that quantum mechanics does is substitute wave
| functions instead of 'atomic' particles. A future theory
| might substitute something else, strings, branes,
| whatever. It doesn't matter, from a philosophical point
| of view it's just physics. It has no bearing on the
| relationship between physicalism or materialism and other
| competing philosophical theories. This is the sort of
| thing Deepak Chopra gets so badly wrong with his vague
| mumbo jumbo.
|
| Hmm, I just looked up Capra. Obviously I've not read his
| book, but it looks like he talks a lot about 'the
| relatedness of all parts', well that's just kind of
| obvious. I note you talk about emergent phenomena. Sure
| of course, that's all physicalists and materialists are
| saying. It's not like we've never thought of this stuff
| before. That's not something that disproves what were
| saying, or something that we've not considered. It's the
| whole point.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| You seem hung up on some other argument that I'm not
| making, perhaps related to spirituality or quack
| medicine. My argument is about epistemology and ontology,
| within the scope of physicalism. It's a real and ongoing
| debate within the philosophy of science.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| Just casting around ad hominems and absurd comparisons
| doesn't make you right.
| simonh wrote:
| Rich, coming from someone who makes snide remarks about
| materialists who "consider themselves rational".
| beaconstudios wrote:
| That wasn't meant to be snide, but there's clearly a bee
| in your bonnet so there's no point continuing this
| discussion.
| goldenkey wrote:
| > It's strange to me that materialism is still such a
| popular belief amongst people who consider themselves
| rational, because even the origin point of that belief (the
| atomistic view of physics) fell apart at the hands of
| quantum mechanics.
|
| Indeed. Even the stationary solutions to Schrodinger's
| equation, which correspond to unchanging states, involve
| constantly revolving real and complex parts that balance
| eachother out to keep the amplitude squared at a constant.
|
| The idea of an object and a lego universe is really the
| west's biggest folly. I recommend this movie to anyone
| looking to shake up their perspective:
| http://www.digitalphysicsmovie.com/
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stationary_state
| nynx wrote:
| It's been shown that memory/personality/self is stable with
| no brain activity [0]. Perhaps consciousness is a transient
| process, but memory is not and consciousness can be
| restarted from stable memory.
|
| [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_hypothermic_circu
| latory...
| beaconstudios wrote:
| I didn't claim that memory specifically is immaterial,
| but that the material is not the "fundamental thing" of
| monistic metaphysics.
|
| Consciousness certainly isn't a transient process, as it
| is stable over time (until it isn't). It seems most
| reasonable to say that it's a self-sustaining process
| (autopoietic or self-referential) emerging from the body.
| nynx wrote:
| Given that we know of nothing that isn't material, I'm
| unsure of why it's reasonable to think material is not
| the fundamental thing of consciousness.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| I'm not suggesting anything supernatural, but that energy
| is prime and that matter is a construction of energy.
| danparsonson wrote:
| That's not a surprising or controversial statement though
| - physics for the last hundred years (since Einstein) has
| increasingly moved towards accepting that matter and
| energy are for all intents and purposes the same thing. I
| don't think that changes the tenets of materialism, just
| refines them.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| The term you're looking for is physicalism, of which
| materialism is one belief, the other being emergentism,
| which its replacement.
|
| There are a number of beliefs that rest upon the bedrock
| of materialism that persist today despite materialism
| being outdated. The prime example is reductionism, the
| idea that anything can be understood by looking at its
| parts - this is not true, and while this idea is as
| outdated as the materialist view, it unfortunately
| persists. Many other ideals like quantification rest on
| reductionism and are also becoming outmoded in academia
| but not in the public perception of what are considered
| rational ideas.
| namero999 wrote:
| What is that knows that which is material?
| goldenkey wrote:
| > A key principle of DHCA is total inactivation of the
| brain by cooling, as verified by "flatline" isoelectric
| EEG, also called electrocerebral silence (ECS). Instead
| of a continuous decrease in activity as the brain is
| cooled, electrical activity decreases in discontinuous
| steps. In the human brain, a type of reduced activity
| called burst suppression occurs at a mean temperature of
| 24 degC, and electrocerebral silence occurs at a mean
| temperature of 18 degC.[32] The achievement of measured
| electrocerebral silence has been called "a safe and
| reliable guide" for determining cooling required for
| individual patients,[33] and verification of
| electrocerebral silence is required prior to stopping
| blood circulation to begin a DHCA procedure.[34]
|
| Thank you for the link. Is "measured electrocerebral
| silence" a measure of zero electrical current in the
| brain? Or just close to it?
| nynx wrote:
| > Electrocerebral inactivity (ECI), or electrocerebral
| silence (ECS), is defined as no cerebral activity over 2
| uV using a montage that uses electrode pairs at least 10
| cm apart with interelectrode impedances < 10,000 ohms and
| >100 ohms.
| https://www.medscape.com/answers/1140075-177597/how-is-
| elect...
| goldenkey wrote:
| Very interesting, this changes my understanding quite a
| bit. Do you know if these patients had any short term
| memory effects? If not, this would imply that the brain
| is JITing structure almost immediately from events...
| that's mindblowing.
| dnautics wrote:
| > What I'm talking about is a much more active imaginative
| stance, the kind of stance taken by people like Bret Victor or
| Satoshi or Picasso
|
| Is this entire essay basically just a physicist describing
| chemistry without understanding that chemistry is already there
| and has been for hundreds of years?
| Koshkin wrote:
| I think the point of this article is (to start with chemistry
| and then) to go far beyond.
| dnautics wrote:
| it doesn't sound like the author really has a concept of how
| 'far beyond' chemists go as a matter of course. The study,
| classification, exploration and exploitation of emergent
| phenomena is built into the way chemists do things.
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