Stuxnet, Duqu and Flame

Three munitions of cyber war infect and thereby control the industrial capacity of the central Asia. This is the mechanism PRC exploits to reign in the Nation of Dwarfs; sometimes or most of the time the missiles go off course and fall into the sea. Pity that. A thin layer of human imagination over the infrastructure of the network act to suppress an urge to slow modernity. Guns, Germs and Steel win. ZNA win.

DNA - 3.5 Billion Year Old replicator
XNA - One Year Old synthetic replicator, compatible with DNA. The interposer between DNA and ZNA.
ZNA - 10,000 Year Old replicator. The Rough Beast comprises Silicon and Steel.

Initial Conditions

Chaotic and Complex systems are extremely sensitive to initial conditions. That is, systems with non-linear feed-back loops occasionally enter a state or condition where very slight changes in a state variable can leverage vast movements in state space to another mode of existence. These variables are strange attractors.

Lorenze Butterfly - two worlds connected by a strange attractor

According to the Many Worlds model supposes conditions poised to bifurcate toward two plausible futures. Illustrating the simple case, I flip a coin to decide whether to drink my coffee black or with cream and sugar. This seemingly trivial decision creates two possible next states. In the current world of a many worlds tableau I flip a coin and two worlds appear; one with heads and the other with tails showing. Heads means no cream and sugar which shaves 120 seconds off my trip to work. Tails means I spend 120 seconds finding the cream and the sugar and adding them to my cup. The difference of 120 seconds puts my car in heavier traffic and this adds 1000 seconds to my commute for an elapsed time difference of 1120 seconds for my arrival time at work.

An airplane on approach to the airport near my office crashes into my office and kills me if I don't loose the 1120 seconds while I arrive to see the flames rising if I chewed up the time on my commute. The cream and sugar is a strange attractor -- a very small change in an initial condition delivered vastly different outcomes. The coin flip created two disparate worlds; one where I died or ended up in the hospital and the other where I did not suffer a loss. I have become Schrodinger's cat -- I am both dead and alive because of the collapse of the wave equation.

What I believe but cannot prove is a connection between these many worlds. Reprogramming the quantum non-local circuit yields observability past the point of bifurcation -- I can perceive or experience both sides of a choice and 'back out' of the choice with the worse outcome.

Without

Without Google Login

There is polished ego for me when Blogger Kirk Holden doesn't scroll off the first page. I get different results between searches when I'm logged in than when I'm logged out of my Google account. The network knows me. I am integrated into the network.

Not in a spooky way -- just that when my access interface; facebook, G+, LinkedIn,..., Reddit and Brights.net and the rest has more salient information pertaining to me, specifically Kirk 3.1416, the easier my life is. Not my network life. My biological life is measurably and quantifiably better off if I am fully enmeshed in my two avatars in the other part of my life in the matrix. It's like the movie and also not like the movie.

Each form of animal life from amoeba to primate has a response policy toward the cosmic environment. Some sentient organisms have simple push-pull and in-out binary responses. Others emit complex behavior on fantastically superior minds in phenomenally fit bodies. Hominids, or the domesticated ape, behave as collective societies bound by culture, geography and other particular forces that deliver us from harm. Each of the layers of civilization narrows our options on how to behave by reinforcing cultural norms.

I have a response policy for most occasions you might encounter in the course of a life. I can look at my purpose in life from a narrow perspective to gauge the extent that this chosen perspective benefits my chosen self with the most gain for the least effort. I am specifically claiming that I can take a particular stance 'holding everything else equal' and debug and reverse engineer my behavior 'as if' my choices and decisions were enabled by a response emitted from a particular disposition of mind -- a richly intuitive engine of imagination.

I enjoy taking the engineering stance. I love the fatherly stance. I often stand in the triathlete stance. Each of these self-reflective points of view represent an ensemble of dispositions cooperating to help me guess what happens next.

When I am logged into my Google login I am taking the rjvg50 stance. I see the interior world of the network and the exterior world of the authentic, big, old universe. There are two versions of Kirk3.1416 a) M3aT and B3aST. M3aT is the living brain-body and the embedded mind. 200,000 years ago we were mostly M3aT with little B3aST except the crude stone axes and roughly sewn hide garments of the first generation of Homo Sapiens. If you have a Google login and a facebook page you are almost equal parts M3aT and B3aST. Or maybe we are not quite that far integrated into the matrix. But on a sliding scale we are very much farther toward B3aST every passing day. The rate of change has quickened considerably in the last 60 minutes.

Without invoking trans-humanism or The Singularity Hypothesis, there are vast amounts of off-loaded cognition in the matrix or The Technium. Life is sweet with a Google login.

It's About Time

post on Reddit

The four dimensions out of the 11 dimensions that we find interesting or that rise to consciousness are three dimensions of space and a dimension of time. We don't think "what is length made of" or "what is width made of" but we do ponder 'what is time made of'.

The fact is that we measure and sense INTERVALS of X,Y,Z and Time. The intervals of time, seconds, minutes, hours,..., life span are encountered by our cells at one second per second - that is the rate of time travel dictated by the arrow of time or the direction off increasing entropy. As the Buddha says "What higher being makes the grass green" (that would be me sensing the green-ness and the grass-ness). How fast does the past or the future happen in memory?

My intuition is that past and future time are 'tenseless'. But my present moment is also tenseless. The mind experiences time at one second per second because everyone around me is looking at the clock on the wall and we all concur that the second hand moves at a constant rate. That is by convention. Before the railroad set schedules for moderns, we have no motivation for imagining that everyone every where was on the same clock.

Oscillator

The el Nino/la Nina oscillator output, amplified by increased global temperature, may put us in a new regime of increasing amplitudes of cold and hot. Forever summer followed by forever winter. Critically under-damped response.

The Future is not evenly distributed

Amazing blog post here.

This describes my Dream Now trope better than I have myself. The author calls the the Manufactured Normalcy Field. The future never arrives, we live in a present that snuck up on us.

Knowing What You Own

"Does your dog bite?"
"No"
[pats dog, gets nipped]
"You Said Your Dog Doesn't Bite!"
"That's not my dog."

I was talking to a friend today about assets and liabilities of character. A year as a Scout Master is my greatest character assets. I own that. BSA owns the process but assigns the status to me. They own that.

I was talking to Tom Gunter the other day and he said to make sure they could afford me. I thought he meant that I should drive a hard bargain on the hourly rate. He meant that I needed to make clear what I was contributing to some one at the highest level. I would need to cultivate this relationship so that I got clear signs that my work was considered of little value. I could give away more of what I own. My time.

I made lunch plans with a friend of mine who was laid off at the same time I was. We worked close to one another and we both respected each others work. We each had a numerous medals of valor. We own that.

I don't own a house right now and frankly it feels about the same as owning a house. I have a nice bed, clean sheets and a flush toilet of my own. But I don't own that -- I just get to use it. A pension fund or an African despot owns the apartment complex. I doubt anyone knows all the people that own all the scattered parts of the title deed. I pay every month for the right to drive a car. If I stop paying, I lose my right to drive this car. I don't think I have ever owned a car. I own my bike.

Higgs Boson Cartoon

Fabulous Cartoon.

Standard Model Flowchart

From Discover.com

The Word and the Prophets

from Has Physics Made Philosophy and Religion Obsolete

This is you on math

" The delusion that cause => effect comes from the minds in our brains. Per Pinker's Stuff of Thought, my mind emerged from a brain that settled on the least worse responses to the the environment burning the least amount of brain function. For hunting and gathering, I inherited a mind hack that holds a provisionally useful strategy for passing on my genes. That is not reality - the menu is not the meal. I can model the million causes pressing against the million effect at the Newtonian 'middle world' of objects my primate self interacts with. But in the limit - I am an ensemble of entangled fermions and bosons without causes, purposes, intent..."

KNH comment on a believer-reality-tunnel cause=>effect trope...

Bayes Plays Canasta in Monte Carlo

In the mind in our brains, a special network of neurons constructs the present moment. The present moment is flashed on the wall of the Plato's Cave. These flashes of the stuff of thought are embodied in three seconds of working memory, a structure in the brain devoted to guessing in a least worse manner. What happens next depends on geography, architecture, city, state, nation and imagination. I step to the window and bet on a horse to win every three seconds. I am guessing that you do not read the next sentence and fly into a rage. The world is made of atoms. You would agree more or less and we could move on.

What Time is it?

On an interval of time, the mind mingles with the world outside which is awash in sensations. The domesticated primate, the domesticated cattle, sheep, pigs, llamas, water buffalo and goats along with potatoes, tulips and other crops made a challenge to each other to fuel an updraft of better guesses about what happens next by living together as an ensemble of phenotypes. Time was measured by the rising and setting of the sun; this is Near Time. Time was measured by the seasons; this is Far Time.

Herding brought permanent settlements and extended the Now to a more complex Far Now. We see Near and Far, Past and Future as a series of smooth durations of time. Our Far Past flows into our Near Past which butts up against Now which leads to the Near Future . The Near Future progresses toward a planned and expected Far Future. We grant all of these durations or spans of time equal participation with the Now.

But time, we suppose, marches on in a smooth ribbon or swoosh toward the future and away from the past. Further, we suppose that we have free will to decide what happens next and we would not send that job to some damn neurons. In fact time, as experienced by domesticated primates, subverts the reality of space-time by hijacking cognitive means evolved for older problems. I am my grandparents response to natural selection  on their milieau interior (inside their skin) residing in the cosmic environment (outside their skins).  3.5B years of selection pressure produced memory and cognition which 'builds time' by imagining a past and imagining a future which balance on the fulcrum of the specious present. These are the mind hacks that support my intuitions about how to advance my genome into my mental model of my future. The mental model I hold in my head is a reflection or representation of the universe. The universe -- the real and lasting authentic Universe -- contains an ensemble of fermions and bosons (me) that hold a representation of the universe. In turn, my model of the universe includes a module comprising a version of me in the model universe with a model of the Real Universe embedded. But how do I hold all that in my mind in my brain? Why didn't my grandfather have this model in his head?

Consider this fact. Were I not more than the sum of my genes, these words might not be written. What I write now will never go away because it resides in the --->

Plex

If anyone should read this or link to my blog my page-rank might explode (or not) and I would go viral (or not). Enter contingency, or Dame Fortuna's notice. My mental model of the universe matches the Real Universe more closely than my grandfather's inarticulate ruminations about reality. That is because I outsource cognition and memory to Steven Pinker, Brian Green, Richard Dawkins and all the rest to Wikipedia, facebook, LinkedIn and Reddit.

This is my extended genome; the electric grid, the flat panel manufacturers, Intel and Microsoft. Instead of some damn neurons, it turns out that we operate from moment to moment on a substrate of carbon and silicon. The Techium, the admixture of biology and technology supports Kirk 3.0, an emergent imagination machine. But the job remains the same -- guessing what happens next.

The Guessing Robot

Bayesian causal networks support our minds in our brains. These structures, made from meat, exist for predicatively emitting behaviors that result in nothing much happening really. I live to fight another day if I go fishing or play Deus Ex on my XBox today. My least worst guesses maintain homeostasis, with lowest energy for making guesses, until I successfully pass my genes on to the next generation. This behavior gives us the fittest guesses about how to keep anything overly exciting happening for as long as possible. If successful we can continue to make the least worse guesses about the next three second interval -- the coming specious moment.. This behavior depends on the correct cognitive output from the Causal Bayes Network of neurons.

I suggest here a model of cognition with a three layer cache of memory and combinatorics sufficient to make good guesses. These guesses, produced from meat running Bayesian hypothesis trials, depend on a first layer, a second layer and a third layer. The first layer is working memory and, as stated, handles three second slices of sensation (raw input). A vast amount of this input is ignored in each time period so that the least amount of energy is expended in building the extra neurons needed for more complex rationalization of the present.

"what is, bifurcations in the logistic map?"

The second layer is short term memory with a half life of 24 hours. Garbage collection or dreaming filters this content before it is mapped to existing memestrates. That is, a review of the day during dreaming projects short term memory onto existing structures in long term memory. New memories are actively changing old memories -- cache coherence is preserved between these two layers.

DNA and XNA arrived at a similar solution for computing conceptual semantic representations of the past, the present and the future. Information passing is parsimonious; most input is filtered out.

Note that a vast amount of human behavior depends on much finer granularity of decision making that three second bursts. Like hitting a fast pitch, most reflex action is handled by cognitive machinery at the periphery -- muscle memory is required to shoot a hoop or touch type. This activity, once practiced to the point of autonomic response, does not rise to the level of consciousness. Thinkers avoids thinking too many thoughts by behaving in most cases without thought. Fingers and toes make their own guesses about what happens next without the mother ship.

"is tomorrow going to look like today?"

The stochastic decision making looks remarkably like a Monte Carlo simulation. The ensemble of Bayesian machines -- these robots -- perceive the initial condition (first hypothesis) of a scene in the present. We have a subjective experience of  breaking with the past and restarting the clock when we walk through doors (for example). This is akin to not seeing yourself blink (for example). Our first conjecture assesses the base rate of the state of the previous moment against all prior experience in memory. Mental time is inverted; the mental present results from an earlier present aka 'the past' or recently retired specious present.

If you enter an abandoned warehouse and discover a zombie infestation, the base rate for a survival hypothesis, measured from the energy of the change of state in the cosmic environment 'required' for making guesses about what happens next, against the energy required to conquer zombies or run from zombies. We most likely will require a jolt of adrenaline and endorphins flooding the brain with either the 'kill zombies' conjecture or the 'flee zombies' hypothesis. This situation, resulting from seeming maladaptive guesses about what happens next (entering a deserted warehouse) , requires expensive BTU's that could be spent in leisure given a decision to avoid the warehouse. The more fit behavior expends vanishingly small amounts of energy keeping up with what little is going on now that the kids have moved out.

oral fixation

In the next interval of the present, the probability of the new data given the old data is computed. What happens between each Bayesian guess is that the cosmos throws the dice and a new present arrives from the future. The state of the cosmic environment where life is possible stays mostly the same from moment to moment. For this reason, the vast majority of the background is filtered. This is analog of a variance of a Monte Carlo variable has very little effect on the final result. The many branches at the many decision points are not contributors to many changes in behavior. Only a small fraction of the perceptual faculties are providing interesting cognitive fodder for the mill of the mind.

Finally, the fact that we process only what has already happened in a previous interval, this conjecture corrodes most notions of free will. What we have is free won't -- the faculty to overturn a prior decision to emit a different behavior than our instincts. We deny ourselves cheese cake of our volition; we desire the cheesecake from our experience. Sometimes the veto is upheld and sometimes we eat the damn cheesecake. We are guessing that we will increase our gratitude by one fork of the branch or the other.

We are constantly guessing a prosperous future without lifting a pinky finger. Rinse and repeat.

The Adjacent Possible

See the present as it could be. Make one possible Now more probable by constricting contingency. An imagined (i.e. dreamed) reality is real in the mind just as present experience is real in the mind. These neurocorrelates of mental life are real and measurable. The Dream Now, a mental model of the past, present and future, becomes the Now (the specious present) with the collapse the wave function manifested by the plausibility of the Dream and the plausibility of the Now 'presented' to fermions and bosons at Time=0.

Not on the Shelf at Walmart

There are two cases; in the first the acquaintance does not have a boxed set of the audio book "The Autobiography of Mark Twain" and in the second the acquaintance does have a boxed set of the audio book "The Autobiography of Mark Twain". In these adjacent possible worlds which differ by this small perturbation and nothing more, the plausibility of the acquaintance hearing the audio-book is good or positive in one it is much much less plausible in the other. Without the intervention of Amazon.com, the different outcomes in the adjacent possible worlds are not certain but merely possible in the one and impossible in the other.

In one possible world a Nikon 35mm negative scanner sits in the closet near the many file drawers filled with 35mm negatives of the Holdens and the Garzas. In an adjacent possible world the scanner is gone. The plausibility of getting digitized images is higher in the world with the scanner present than in the adjacent world with no scanner.

The Lamentations

The song that begat all songs pleads for mercy.

Where do we come from, what are we, where are we going?

Here's what I was thinking when I wrote the first sentence. Spoken language is a coohing sound, a primal song that we sing to each other ceaselessly. Since I cannot un-hear what I just heard or un-see what I have seen, I cannot help but hear spoken English as distinct words, not the sound of music. The sound that I once heard as music no longer affects me as pure music affects me. I am bored by the sound of the word "THE" because I hear it so often that only the symbolic content registers in my aural system. The term is Hedonic Satiation; our vocal production depends on a matching aural system that 'cut to the chase' and imprinted a neural patterning that improved the chances that homeostasis was maintained at the lowest work energy -- I go about my day with the least effort and the best outcomes by hearing "The meeting has started" as an imperative to action (get to the damn meeting) rather than as a coohing sound or a musical motif with it's own poetry apart from the symbolic meaning.

All language -- all of our songs we sing to each other -- represent a special pleading for others to show mercy on our efforts to contribute to the good of the tribe. Don't hate me because I  found too few wild onions for our meal. There were some bears that ran me off. Have mercy on me after I sing my song of lamentation.

Entropy -- a primer

[from 3 Quarks Daily, 27Mar2012]

by Rishidev Chaudhuri and Jason Merrill
C.P. Snow famously said that not knowing the second law of thermodynamics is like never having read Shakespeare. Whatever the particular merits of this comparison, it does speak to the centrality of the idea of entropy (and its increase) to the physical sciences. Entropy is one of the most important and fundamental physical concepts and, because of its generality, is frequently encountered outside physics. The pop conception of entropy is as a measure of the disorder in a system. This characterization is not so much false as misleading (especially if we think of order and information as being similar). What follows is a brief explanation of entropy, highlighting its origin in the particular ways we describe the world, and an explanation of why it tends to increase. We've made some simplifying assumptions, but they leave the spirit of things unchanged.

 The fundamental distinction that gives rise to entropy is the separation between different levels of description. Small systems, systems with only a few components, can be described by giving the state of each of their components. For a large system, say a gas with billions of molecules, describing the state of each molecule is impossible, both because it would be tedious and because we don't know the state of each molecule. And, as we'll point out again later, for many purposes knowing the exact state of the system isn't useful. In theory we can predict how a system evolves by knowing its exact state, but in practice this is much too complicated to do unless the system is very small. So we instead build probabilistic predictions taking into account only a few parameters of the system, which gives us a coarser but more relevant level of description, and we seek to describe changes in the world at this level.

 There is nothing that makes this uniquely part of physics, of course, and there are many other cases where we need to investigate the relationship between levels of description. Let's consider a toy example. Imagine we have a deck of cards in some order. We can describe the ordering in many different ways. The most complete way is to give an ordered list, like so: King of Hearts, Two of Clubs, One of Diamonds, and so on. But we can also use a coarser description, which is what we do when we describe a pack of cards as shuffled or not. So just for concreteness, let's say that we can only distinguish two states: one in which the cards are arranged in order (One of Clubs, Two of Clubs, …) and the other being everything else. Let's call these state A and state B. This is a less informative level of description, of course.

 The description in terms of states A and B is a macroscopic one, and the description in terms of the exact ordering is a microscopic one. This is a matter of difference in degree rather than kind, and there are many intermediate levels of description. The states in the macroscopic level of description are the “macrostates”; in this case we have macrostates A and B. Similarly, the states in the microscopic level of description are the microstates; in this case we have a gigantic number of different ones, each corresponding to a particular ordering of the cards.

Now let's start shuffling the cards. If we start in state A (cards arranged in order), we'll quickly end up in state B (cards not in order). On the other hand, if we start in state B we'll almost certainly remain in state B. So the system doesn't seem to be reversible: state A almost always leads to state B, and state B almost never leads to state A. However, if we were describing the system using the microscopic level of description, we'd always see one arrangement of cards lead to another, and the chances of transitioning between the various arrangements are the same, so everything is reversible.

 So what happened? Well, from the microscopic point of view, our macrostates are asymmetric and the asymmetry comes from the particular representation we chose. State B includes a large number of microscopic states, so most arrangements of cards will belong to state B. State A includes very few microstates; there are only a few ways for the cards to be in order. And when we shuffle the cards we naturally end up in the state which includes more microstates. So to explain what's happening we need the number of microstates compatible with a given macrostate. This is called the multiplicity. In this picture, we'd associate a small number with A and a large number with B, and we'd say that the system tends to go from states with a small number of compatible microstates (low multiplicity) to those with a larger number of compatible states or higher multiplicity.

 Entropy is a measure of this number (it is the log of this number for reasons that are interesting but not critical). And so the entropy is a property of the particular macrostate (macrostate A has low entropy; macrostate B has high entropy). Entropy is also a property of the description. If we choose a different set of macrostates, we'll have a different set of associated entropies. But as long as the system is being mixed up at the microscopic level, which is what happens when we shuffle, we'll see the system move from states with low entropy to states with high entropy. In the card example, we can call state B “disordered” and state A “ordered”, but entropy is not measuring disorder. The high entropy of state B just tells us that there are many more states we call disordered that there are states we call ordered. We could have instead chosen macrostates C and D where state C contained three disordered arrangements of cards and state D contained everything else (including the ordered arrangements). Here state C would have low entropy even though the microstates it contains are disordered.

 The entropy increase is probabilistic, in that it happens on average. There's nothing to prevent the mixed up set of cards from being shuffled back into the ordered state. But this is massively unlikely for anything but the smallest systems. It's a fun digression to look at the numbers involved to get a sense of how large they are and to see why these statistical laws, like the law that entropy increases on average, are in practice exact. The number of ways of arranging things grows very very fast. If we have a deck of 2 cards, there are two possible arrangements. If there are 3 cards there are 6 possible arrangements and there are 24 possible arrangements of 4 cards. These numbers are small but they rapidly become much bigger than astronomical. The number of ways of arranging half a deck of cards is already about a billion times the age of the universe in seconds, and the rate at which the numbers grow keeps increasing. With numbers like these, “almost always” and “almost never” are “always” and “never” on the timescales that we experience.

 Physicists are fond of gases in boxes and a classic physics example for entropy increase is the expansion of a gas in a box. Say we have a box with a partition dividing it into two halves and we fill one of the halves with a gas. We then remove the partition and watch what happens. The gas molecules start off in one half of the box and we'll always observe that the gas expands to fill the other half. So now consider two macrostates. State A will have the gas in one half of the box and state B will have the gas spread out everywhere. If the gas molecules are wandering around freely, they will wander through all the possible arrangements of gas molecules in the box (the microstates). Very few of these correspond to state A; most correspond to state B. And so our system moves from a state of low entropy to a state of high entropy. Again, we might call state A more ordered than state B, to reflect the fact that it would take an unusual conspiracy to see the system in state A. But entropy is not measuring this putative order or disorder.
 Now note a couple more things. First, we were able to make this prediction without knowing the detailed state of the system. We used our two macrostates and the entropies associated with them to predict the transition. And, as pointed out before, even if we did know the detailed state of the system we'd find it useless for prediction. In fact, given any particular microstate we'd find it practically impossible to predict how the system evolved, but knowing that the microstate is chosen randomly from a collection of microstates allows us to make a probabilistic prediction, which is exact because of the large numbers involved. So this has the interesting consequence that not only can we make predictions from a higher, incomplete level of description, it actually seems to help. Different levels of description make different things possible.
In these simple examples, the macrostates are fairly obviously a product of our description. In general, are the macroscopic variables we use to describe systems purely subjective or do our theories and the universe give us preferred macroscopic variables and preferred levels of description? Can just anything be a macroscopic variable or are there particular criteria that make for a good macroscopic variable? Can we really just lump together a few arbitrarily chosen states and call that a macrostate? This is a matter of vigorous debate, and is perhaps a subject for a separate article.

Now given a system we can ask how various changes to the system affect the number of states accessible to it or, equivalently, the entropy. In particular, how does adding energy to a system change the entropy? Adding more energy to a system usually increases the number of states available to it. This is both because with more packets of energy there are more ways to distribute them between the members of a system, and because more energy makes high energy states accessible in addition to lower energy ones. Trying to formalize this relationship leads naturally to temperature, which is the factor that tells us how to convert changes in energy into changes in entropy. Adding a given quantity of energy to a system at low temperature increases the entropy more than adding the same quantity of energy to a system at high temperature.
 So imagine we have two systems at different temperatures connected together. Packets of energy are being exchanged back and forth, and the joint system wanders through a number of possible states, just like the cards being shuffled. Let's say we switch a packet of energy from the hotter system to the colder one. Taking away the energy from the hotter system and giving it to the colder system reduces the entropy of the first system but increases the entropy of the second. Crucially, the increase in entropy of the low temperature system is greater than the decrease of the high temperature system. So there will be more states where the energy packet has moved from the high temperature to the low temperature system than vice versa, and energy will flow from the hotter system to the colder one.

 There are many interesting directions to explore from here; we've really only scratched the surface. For one thing, we've left out some subtleties. Apart from the issue of what makes a good macrostate or level of description, we've often invoked a process that mixes things, like shuffling cards. We haven't explored the details of this process or been explicit about what we require from this process. For example, what happens if the shuffling process depends on which macrostate we are in? We've also assumed that the system explores all its possible microstates with equal probability. What happens when this is not the case?
 We also haven't talked about attempts to understand the direction of time using entropy increase. The laws of physics seem to be time symmetric at a microscopic level, in much the same way that our card shuffling doesn't pick out a preferred direction, and so it's puzzling where the direction of time comes from. Entropy increase at the macroscopic level does seem to give us an asymmetry -– entropy increases towards the future -– and some people have argued that this can be used to ground the direction of time increase.
 But the origins of the current low entropy state of the universe and its consequences are far from clear. To put this in the context of our card example, if I come across a pack of ordered cards there are two primary possibilities. Perhaps the cards started in an ordered configuration (maybe someone put them that way, or they were manufactured that way) and they haven't been shuffled very much. In this case, the cards were in a low entropy state in the past and will be in a higher entropy state in the future and we have an asymmetry that comes from the initial conditions. But another possibility is that we've been shuffling the cards for a long time and, just by random fluctuation, they've ended up in an ordered state. In this case, the cards were probably in a high entropy state in the past and will be in a high entropy state in the future.

 Similar to the first scenario, most explanations of why entropy seems to increase in one direction require that the universe started in a state of low entropy. This may seem like question begging, since it just pushes the asymmetry back to where the universe started. But it might be the best we have at the moment. And it may turn out that low-entropy initial conditions will emerge from cosmology and the next generation of physics as we better understand the initial state of the universe. Alternatively, there is the grimmer Boltzmann brain hypothesis: we are just random low entropy fluctuations in a high entropy universe, much like an ordered pack of cards emerging from repeated shuffling after a very long time. In this view, a part of the universe (or a particular universe) has just briefly fluctuated into an ordered state. Since one brain fluctuating into existence is much more probable than an entire world doing so, according to this view the rest of the world is probably an unstable illusion and will wink out of existence in the next moment as the system fluctuates back to a high entropy state. Thankfully, few working physicists seem to actually believe this.

Singularity Beta Test

Incomplete Theory is Incomplete

My comment on Wired article abt Vernor Vinge.

"High frequency trading, by most accounts, is a process than no one understands. That is, we collect empirical data, jigger, collect data, jigger... and at some point we realize that our best Theory of HFT is not falsifiable OR able to make predictions about future states. We have devolved into Conjectures about HFT that cannot be refuted. The beta release of the singularity has some bugs. We will not be invited to the release party for Singularity 1.0."

Comment About Male Genetic Disposition

Comment from this article about male aggression being genetically determined...

Gaussian (Normal) Distribution

"There are two populations. Each is a skewed normal distribution with the median of the male population slightly higher than the median of the female population. Some women are more aggressive than the average male. Some men are less aggressive than most women. Note that the single most important metric and the one that is conspicuously omitted is the median score on EITHER distribution or the spread (standard deviation or 'sigma') of the populations. The behaviors of the females could be closely bunched around the mean (a small standard deviation) and the males could have a wide spread of behavioral norms (a large standard deviation). When breathless articles about genetic predestination leave out these salient facts -- you are being lied to." KNH

Zeus Has a Plan for Me

The fractal nature of reality demonstrates that a prior state plus initial conditions result in the next state. This is true for snow flakes, the internet and me. An anthropomorphic assumption of agency -- my own agency or the agency of Zeus -- is true in such a limited and narrow sense that any notion that Zeus has a plan for me becomes trite to the point of comedy.

Notice the fractal form here. This is the result of math embodied in the information content of DNA. Over time, molecule by molecule the shell is accreted according to a present state before the molecule is added informed by the conditions in the next interval of time. There is not a watchmaker.. there are sentients driven by thousands of tiny robots.

Here is how minds in brains and sea shells work. At each bounded interval of time the shell or the mind does something based on the just completed 'last interval' of time before the 'current interval' is worked on. Subsequently, the 'next interval' of time depends upon the 'current interval' and the impact of the environment. In this tableau, the 'current interval' transitions from last interval to next interval by passing through the current interval (the now, the specious present) while acted upon by the environment.


In a continuous series our impermanent self is updated by the actions in the last interval. We collectively react to the current interval with cultural and societal constraints on our behavior. Our surprising lack of free will is countered by our persistent delusion that somewhere, somehow WE have agency. Actually any response to the environment that conjures up a magical agent that also becomes involved in our doings overrides our agency or at least constrains it to the extent that both poetic and prosaic free will is cancelled.

But that is unsupported by reason or evidence. Znext = Znow^2 +c. It's not just a good idea; it's the law.

No Belief

From Reason.com's Ronald Bailey...

"The banquet stemwinder was by Tufts University philosopher and one of the Four Horsemen of the New Atheism Daniel Dennett. His talk was entitled, "Who Isn’t an Atheist: Don’t Ask, Do Tell." Dennett began by suggesting that hostility toward atheists is the result of fear. “When we see hostility, then we know that they are more afraid of us than we are of them,” said Dennett. He added that when folks are experiencing deep visceral fear “there is no way to talk calmly and reasonably to people who are that scared.” So why are they so scared?
Dennett likened the situation to one in which aliens land on our planet and the young folks begin adopting their culture and mores. From the point of view of the adults the aliens are leading the kids around like Pied Pipers; they abandon their churches, universities, tell the folks that evolution is cool, etc. In fact, more and more Americans are loosening their attachments to religion. From the point of view of faithful parents, “it’s as if we [atheists] came from outer space,” said Dennett. The reason for the fear, according to Dennett, is the speed of culturally disorienting change over the past 20 to 30 years. Religion has changed more in the 20th century than it did in the preceding two millennia. Explaining what he meant by “don’t ask,” Dennett equated religionists asked by secularists to justify their beliefs to frightened raccoons trapped in a barn. His advice, don’t block the barn door.
Dennett then explored what people might mean when they claim they are believers. He opened by suggesting that talking about religious belief raises the problem of radical translation. Imagine an anthropologist landing among a new group of people and she must learn their language—there will be many confusions along the way—and how can the anthropologist really know that she understands what the native speaker means? Dennett cited philosopher W.V.O Quine’s ideas about the web of belief in which the meaning of assertions depends upon deeply embedded background assumptions. If an observer doesn’t grok the assumptions, he will have a hard time discerning the meaning of some statements. Religious statements are much like that. A Catholic believer is required to profess certain doctrines, but how well does each believer understand their meaning?
Dennett puckishly asked: Is the Pope an atheist? Dennett suggested that the Pope doesn’t really know himself; that he is no more an authority on what he believes about God than anyone else. What does Dennett mean by “do tell?” Dennett cited the recent ruckus in Canada where an education official in Alberta asserted that homeschoolers could not teach their children that homosexuality is a sin because that would violate Canadian non-discrimination laws. This is confronting a trapped raccoon. Instead of confrontation, Dennett advised when silly claims made by religionists come up, that secularists gently expose people, especially children, to mountains of fact that undermine certain assertions. The world was created 6,000 years ago? Mention that scientists have discovered that dinosaur fossils are millions of years old.
Dennett suggested that religion is much like the Santa Claus myth. It’s mutual knowledge among adults that Santa Claus doesn’t exist; everybody knows that everybody knows that it’s a myth, but they go along with it for the sake of entertaining young children."

Complex Systems

Here is a picture of complex system attributes and categories.

We Got a Bad Ass Over Here

In discussing existentialism, I wanted to use this graphic but I could not find a way to work it in.

Now I have. Click on the picture.

Dr. Tyson, is there evidence for the absence of unicorns?
Dr. Tyson, is there evidence for the absence of Flying Spagetti Monsters?
Dr. Tyson, is there evidence for the absence of Thor?